The Best Way to Play Earnings with Options — with John Shon (transcript)

new book by john shon

This transcript comes an interview with John Shon that you can find here.  You can also find our archives of interviews with some of the world’s best investors here.

Announcer: Live from the Internet, it’s Tradestreaming Radio, with your host, Tradestreaming.com’s own Zack Miller.new book by john shon

Zack: Hey, this is Zack Miller. You’re listening to Tradestreaming Radio, the place on the Internet where investors can learn directly from experts.

One thing I’ve found in my individual investing practice, both my own investing and the work I do with clients, is that, although I know basic options strategies, I’ve struggled to really implement them. More than anything, I feel that options are a great way for a lot of investors to lower the risk in terms of playing out a thesis that they have on a particular stock.

The hardest thing to do with options is to pick a direction, and this is what many investors do, is to buy a call or buy a put, and basically say, “I’m making a bet that the stock’s going to go up or down.” It’s (a) very hard to pick which direction, and (b) a lot of times even if we’re right, meaning earnings season is particularly good, there’s some good news out, the stock may not react the way we’re predicting it.

I was really interested to read this book that was put out recently on the FT Press by John Shon, who’s a professor of accounting at Fordham. He has a Ph.D. from University of Chicago at Booth School. He wrote a book along with Ping Zhou called “Trading on Corporate Earnings News: Profiting from Targeted Short-Term Options Positions.” I invited John on to the show today to discuss the book. Continue reading “The Best Way to Play Earnings with Options — with John Shon (transcript)”

When Good Trades Go Bad: Deadly Portfolio — with John Hohn

The fine line between doing what’s right for a client and what’s good for you is walked daily by financial advisors.

Most of the time things go off without a hitch.But sometimes, the results of poor decision making are disastrous.

John Hohn joins us on Tradestreaming Radio to talk about his new book, Deadly Portfolio: A Killing in Hedge Funds. John had a 40 year career in financial services, all the while exploring his avocation, writing.

Deadly Portfolio is his first book and it explores the insides of the financial industry, how decisions are made, how brokers make a living, and how wealthy clients behave.It’s also full of murder and intrigue…
We talk to John about the book and his experiences in managing 300 brokerage clients influenced his writings. Continue reading “When Good Trades Go Bad: Deadly Portfolio — with John Hohn”

The End of Probability: A new way of thinking about derivatives — with Elie Ayache

Every once in a while, you meet someone and you just look in the mirror and think: hey, I’m not worthy. What am I doing with my life?

Today’s guest Elie Ayache is part entrepreneur, part philosopher, and part technologist.He takes aim at Taleb’s Black Swan model (and in general our view of probability and market pricing) and provides a new model of how to view contingent claims and their relationship with the market’s pricing mechanism. He walks the talk, growing and expanding his software firm’s client base with institutional investors.It’s possible that with time, his software and theory will have a significant impact on how contingent claims are viewed, priced and traded.

We discuss his new book, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability.  I learned a ton about how this all works (even if I didn’t understand everything Ayache spoke about). Continue reading “The End of Probability: A new way of thinking about derivatives — with Elie Ayache”

Top Investment Resources for Sentiment Analysis

The holy grail for investors — and one being frantically searched for by technologists, entrepreneurs, and investors — is to find a way to program machines to decipher social media (or more accurately, unstructured text) and structure a trading system around it.

Sentiment analysis (the ability to pull out what people are feeling by the words they’re using online) is one of the next big things in investing. Here are a few of the resources investors may want to consider when learning about sentiment analysis and portfolio management.

Have any suggestions? Add your own below.

The Best Way to Play Earnings with Options — with John Shon

Investors should always be on the prowl for investment strategies to improve returns while lowering risk.

new book by john shon

While everyone knows that options can help here, very few individual investors I’ve met actually have a good strategy to implement options.

John Shon, author of Trading on Corporate Earnings News: Profiting from Short Term Options Positions and a professor of accounting at Fordham University, joins us on this episode to discuss:

  • why earnings announcements are good times for investors to make money
  • why stocks continue to move big after earnings, even though they’re being scrutinized
  • how to use options regardless of whether we’re right about earnings strength/weakness
  • how to capitalize on post-earnings announcement drift (stocks continue to move AFTER earnings announcement)
  • advice on how to increase chances of success in options strategies around earnings announcements Continue reading “The Best Way to Play Earnings with Options — with John Shon”

Using small bets to become a better investor — with Peter Sims (transcript)

On Tradestreaming Radio, we’re interviewing lots of innovative entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers all trying to make investors better at what they do. Check out our archives. Subscribe on iTunes.

Part of learning to be a successful investor comes from learning to fail.

Sometimes we’re afraid to fail so we don’t bother trying.  Other times we bet too much only to prematurely end the learning process.

Successful investing comes from making small mistakes, learning from them, to get to a successful outcome.  It’s as much about the process than it is the outcome.

Peter Sims, author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, joins us on Tradestreaming Radio to discuss his findings after interviewing hundreds of successful businessmen, entrepreneurs, and social scientists. Continue reading “Using small bets to become a better investor — with Peter Sims (transcript)”

Using dividends to build your portfolio — with Paul Rubillo (podcast)

Dividends are essential building blocks of retirement portfolios and growth and value investing.

Paul Rubillio, author of Be a Dividend Millionaire: A Proven, Low-Risk Approach that Will Generate Income for the Long Term, joins us on this episode of Tradestreaming Radio.

We discuss:

  1. dividend.com ‘s system for ranking high dividend stocks
  2. Paul’s experience trading full-time for a living
  3. common mistakes investors make when looking at income producing stocks
  4. how dividend.com grew to be the largest dividend website without paying for marketing

Continue reading “Using dividends to build your portfolio — with Paul Rubillo (podcast)”

Become a better investor by boosting your confidence – with Tim Sanders (transcript)

On Tradestreaming Radio, we’re interviewing lots of innovative entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers all trying to make investors better at what they do. Check out our archives. Subscribe on iTunes.

Audio transcription provided by Speechpad.com.

Announcer: Live from the Internet, it’s Tradestreaming Radio with your host, Tradestreaming.com’s own Zack Miller.

Zack: Hey, this is Zack Miller, and this is Tradestreaming Radio, our place on the Internet to talk about tools, tips, and technologies to
help make you a better, more accurate investor. This is our podcast.

You can find this podcast on iTunes. You can also find this podcast and all of our archives on my website, Tradestreaming.com. There’s a lot of great content there as well. Come drop by, leave us a comment. Let us know what you think about the podcast, and let us know what we can do better. This is about you guys and helping bubble up great ideas from expert opinion to help us all in our daily work.

Very honored today, we have a bestselling author guest. His name is Tim Sanders. He’s a consultant of Fortune 1000 companies and
an international keynote speaker. He’s authored four books, the first of which was the New York Times and international bestseller, Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. His newest book is called Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence

We met up with Tim on a grueling three-month road show, where he was talking at conventions, speaking in front of affiliate groups, and obviously launching his book. Tim, in the same steps as Todd Tresidder, who we had on a couple of weeks back, is a motivational speaker. But he’s more than that. He helps meld thought, breaking our thoughts, getting us thinking about positive, and actually bringing us into action with those thoughts.

This was a field I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to when we first started the podcast. In fact, I was focusing more on the pure investment, the quant side, even the qualitative side. This is more touchy-feely in my mind, but I find I got a lot of great feedback from Todd’s financial mentor podcast. This one’s a great one. Tim’s going to help us talk about everything about the diet we should feed our mind, breaking out of sort of a loser thought process and finding meaning in everything that we do. I found this conversation with Tim incredibly uplifting, and it made me actually go want to fight a bear. So I hope you find it as interesting. Let us know what you think. We’ll just jump right into the conversation. Continue reading “Become a better investor by boosting your confidence – with Tim Sanders (transcript)”

Using small bets to become a better investor — with Peter Sims (podcast)

Part of learning to be a successful investor comes from learning to fail.

Sometimes we’re afraid to fail so we don’t bother trying.  Other times we bet too much only to prematurely end the learning process.

Successful investing comes from making small mistakes, learning from them, to get to a successful outcome.  It’s as much about the process than it is the outcome.

Peter Sims, author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, joins us on Tradestreaming Radio to discuss his findings after interviewing hundreds of successful businessmen, entrepreneurs, and social scientists. Continue reading “Using small bets to become a better investor — with Peter Sims (podcast)”

Best investors of all time

If you could pick a team of investors — the best investors of all time — who would you pick first?

I’ve assembled the beginning of a list (it’s just the beginning).  Are the best investors old-school value gurus like Ben Graham or more like the research and technology machines like Stevie Cohen’s SAC Capital?

You make the call. Vote below. Continue reading “Best investors of all time”