I spent over a decade trading options the wrong way before I figured out what actually works.Like most retail traders, I started on the buying side. News in the background. Twitter scrolling for the next setup. Calls before earnings. Puts when I "felt" a pullback coming. I told myself I was being strategic. I was guessing, and the market was charging me tuition for it.The wipeout came faster than I want to admit.
Not a rough quarter. The whole account. And after I sat with it long enough to stop blaming the market, one question kept surfacing: if 70 to 80 percent of options expire worthless, why was I constantly on the wrong side of that math?The answer was simple and uncomfortable. I was paying a premium for the privilege of being right about direction, timing, and magnitude all at once. The house was selling me lottery tickets and I kept buying them.
So I flipped the entire approach. I started selling premium instead of buying it. But I refused to do it on instinct this time. I pulled 6,354 trading days of SPY data and tested every assumption I'd ever held about strikes, expirations, and volatility. The numbers were unforgiving and clarifying. 79.9 percent of daily moves stayed inside one standard deviation. The edge wasn't in predicting direction. It was in selling time and volatility to people who thought they could.That work became the 17/45 framework, the IV rank filter, and the trade scorecard I use every week. Sqilled exists because no one taught me this when I needed it. So I built the school I wished I'd had.
The most common things people ask before getting started. If you don't see your question here, the free masterclass is the best place to bring it, 30 minutes of live Q&A every session.
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Educational only, not financial advice · Trading involves risk · Free to start