Performance Dissected
Our contributor @Yowster did an excellent analysis in his 2025 Year End Performance By Trade Type post. Most SO trades are Vega positive trades leading up to earnings events, so volatility plays a key role in the outcome of our trades. 2025 saw 4 VIX spikes that occurred rather quickly (not a gradual rise), most spikes were relatively short in duration with declines starting shortly after the spikes. Trades that were in place prior to the spike performed well, but other trades that did not encompass a spike commonly dealt with falling volatility and RV declines bigger than prior earnings cycles. This meant that trade that would have been small to moderate gains in prior years turned into small to moderate losses this year. Losses above 10% were also more common.
As usually, we are very transparent about our performance even when things don’t work as expected. No strategy can outperform all the time, and SteadyOptions is no exception.
There were some things that worked very well this year, although they were in some of the portfolios outside of SO. Steady Yields (SY) and Simple Spreads (SS) performed very well as many of their trades were helped by the same things that hurt the SO trades. Most trades in SY and SS tended to be Vega negative, meaning that they were helped by declining IV – so both time decay and declining IV helped these trades.
Members who subscribed to our all services bundle did very well in 2025:
If you allocated an equal amount of capital to each one of our services, your portfolio would be up 36.2% in 2025. In terms of average return of all our services, this was in fact one of our best years.
Congratulations to our bundle members, and huge thank you to our contributors:
@Yowster @krisbee @cwelsh @
As I mentioned in one of the discussion topics, our performance reporting is very conservative. We rarely have more than 5 trades open at the same time, but with 5 trades open, you are basically only 50% invested. If you made 10% on the invested capital, we would report as 5% return on the total account. No service is doing it, but this is the only correct way to do it. But it also means that members can invest more than 10% per trade on trades that are more conservative and more liquid. Also there are tons of unofficial trades that don’t make it to the official portfolio due to their size.being too large for 10k portfolio. If we reported performance like most other services do (return on investment and not on the whole portfolio), our reported performance would be 300%+. More details: How We Calculate Returns?
After 14 years in business, SteadyOptions maintains its position as the most stable and consistent options trading service, with 114.5% Compounded Annual Growth Rate.
Our strategies
SteadyOptions uses a mix of non-directional strategies: earnings plays, Long Straddle, Long Strangle, Calendar Spread, Butterfly, Iron Condor, etc. We constantly adding new strategies to our arsenal, based on different market conditions. SO model portfolio is not designed for speculative trades although we might do some in the speculative forum. SO is not a get-rich-quick-without-efforts kind of newsletter. I’m a big fan of the “slow and steady” approach. We aim for many singles instead of a few homeruns. My first goal is capital preservation instead of doubling your account. Think about the risk first. If you take care of the risk, the profits will come.
What makes SO different?
We use a total portfolio approach for performance reporting. This approach reflects the growth of the entire account, not just what was at risk. We balance the portfolio in terms of options Greeks. SteadyOptions provides a complete portfolio solution. We trade a variety of non-directional strategies balancing each other. You can allocate 60-70% of your options account to our strategies and still sleep well at night.
Our performance is based on real fills. Each trade alert comes with a screenshot of our broker fills. We put our money where our mouth is. Our performance reporting is completely transparent. All trades are listed on the performance page, with the exact entry/exit dates and P/L percentage.
It is not a coincidence that SteadyOptions is ranked #1 out of 723 Newsletters on Investimonials, a financial product review site. We also get a very high 4.6 score on trustpilot, the most trusted reviews site. The reviewers especially mention our honesty and transparency, and also tremendous value of our trading community.
We place a lot of emphasis on options education. There is a dedicated forum where every trade is discussed before the trade is placed. We discuss different strategies and potential trades. Unlike most other services that just send the trade alerts, our members understand the rationale behind the trades and not just blindly follow the alerts. SO actually helps members to become better traders.
Other services
In addition to SteadyOptions, we offer the following services:
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Anchor Trades – Stocks/ETFs hedged with options for conservative long term investors.
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Simple Spreads – simple spread strategies like diagonal spreads and vertical spreads.
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SteadyVIX – Volatility based trades.
- SteadyYields – Treasures trading
We offer all services bundle at $3,000 per year. This represents up to 68% discount compared to individual services rates and you will be grandfathered at this rate as long as you keep your subscription active. Details on the subscription page. More bundles are available – click here for details. You can also get the yearly bundle with one month trial at $100 (one trial per member).
Subscribing to all services provides excellent diversification since those services have low correlation.
We also offer Managed Accounts for Anchor Trades.
Summary
2025 was a challenging year for SO, but a very solid year for the rest of our services.
SteadyOptions is now 14 years old. We’ve come a long way since we started. We are now recognized as:
- #1 Ranked Newsletter on Investimonials
- Top rated service on trustpilot
- Top Rated Newsletter on Stockgumshoe
- Steady Options Review: In-Depth Analysis
- Top 10 Option Trading Blogs by Options Trading IQ
- Top 6 Options Newsletters by Benzinga
- Top 40 Options Trading Blogs by Feedspot
- Top 15 Trading Forums by Feedspot
- Top 20 Trading Forums by Robust Trader
- Top Twitter Accounts to Follow by Options Trading IQ
I see the community as the best part of our service. We have the best and most engaged options trading community in the world. We now have over 10,000 registered members from over 50 counties. Our members posted over 190,000 posts in the last 13 years. Those facts show you the tremendous added value of our trading community.
I want to thank each of you who’ve joined us and supported us. We continue to strive to be the best community of options traders and continuously improve and enhance our services.
Let me finish with my favorite quote from Michael Covel:
“Profits come in bunches. The trick when going sideways between home runs is not to lose too much in between.”
If you are not a member and interested to join, you can click here to join our winning team. When you join SteadyOptions, we will share with you all we know about options. We will never try to sell you any additional “proprietary systems”, training, webinars etc. All our “secrets” are included in your monthly fee.
