Michigan Option Traders (Part 1)

A look through the archives reveals no content about the trading group that I, myself, organized: Michigan Option Traders.

I started Michigan Option Traders in December 2014. In the months leading up to that first meeting, I had e-mailed option traders in southeastern lower Michigan who I had found on forums and/or trading communities asking if they would be interested in such an endeavor. I found roughly 8-10 who expressed varied levels of interest.

At the first meeting, I distributed the following handout:

      The agenda is informal and vague. I’d like for everyone to spend some time talking about:

• Personal introduction
• Brief synopsis of trading background and level
• Education (e.g. seminars, mentorship or trader education programs, books read, etc.)
• Trading strengths and weaknesses
• Overall trading goals
• Desired objectives for an options trading group
• Frequency and nature of group meetings
• Suggestions for how members might communicate between physical meetings
• Thoughts on beginners
• Thoughts on keeping door perpetually open to new members
• Brokerage platform and analytics software used
• Particular trades on which you would like to work with others

We started with a monthly meeting at different libraries in the Metro Detroit area. People said it was inconvenient to drive (up to one hour each way) to an evening meeting during the workweek so we then moved to Skype and started doing a weekly group chat. The group survived for roughly 18 months. We had 4-5 regular participants. One participant was a full-time trader. One participant was a private practice physician who traded extensively (like a full-time trader). The others who occasionally dropped in traded very little or intermittently depending on life’s demands.

I eventually closed the group because I felt I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Fast forwarding to present, I would hope to gain one of two main things from such a group: learning and implementing new trading strategies for myself; group research collaboration with the hopes of implementing new trading strategies for myself. For me, learning in a group context like this is different from watching an on-line webinar or reading a book because I would be associating with a flesh-and-blood human being that I can see, smell, hear, touch, etc. That is someone I can come to trust and if they have had success (and failure, which I hope they would also discuss) trading a strategy then I should be able to emulate it.

Aside from Michigan Option Traders, I have considered the possibility of organizing related groups on Meetup.com. I consider this a series of failures because these groups have never come to fruition. Examples are given here, here, and here.

I therefore feel that I have both suffered repeated failures and had very limited success with regard to option trading groups. I still have a desire to make one concerted effort for the masses. Part of the struggle is figuring out what exactly to pitch.