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David Jaffee

What if Everyone Started Selling Options?

About once a week, David Jaffee of BestStockStrategy.com is asked the same question.

What would happen if everyone started selling options?

When people ask this question, they fail to understand that most human beings, at their core, act irrationally. 

People are self-destructive. If they weren’t, nightclubs, cigarettes, casinos, lotteries, packaged foods, sodas, and other harmful stuff would not exist. 

Human beings are a slave to dopamine, and this is getting worse with the advent of mobile devices, Instagram, TikTok, and similar things that provide people with instant gratification. 

Because people are slaves to dopamine, they engage in short-term, risky behavior to get a dopamine fix. They do this because the consequences of their negative behavior are not immediate.

David Jaffee understands how difficult it can be to sacrifice. 

David Jaffee grew up in a poor area and went to a high school where students did not have to work hard. David Jaffee often skipped class while still managing to get good grades and get into a good university. 

However, when he went to Cornell, David Jaffee realized that his fellow students were very smart, and he had to study hard to keep up with them. 

David Jaffee disliked attending Cornell University. Even though he received good grades, he was not as smart as the grades that he achieved. As a result, he had to outperform, out study, and out work the students that he got better grades than. 

When he graduated college, David Jaffee started working as an investment banker, which was also extremely self-destructive. Nobody who actually cares about themselves should ever tolerate working in a toxic environment like investment banking.

Investment banking is a horrible job. Even the managing directors, most of whom have been working in investment banking for over 10 years, oftentimes hate their lives and possess a lot of self-loathing.

David Jaffee shares this experience because it highlights a bit of a paradox in thinking. Just because someone makes a lot of money or holds a position with a significant amount of prestige does not mean they are any better at engaging in self-destructive behavior than a typical person. 

Many people who have achieved a large amount of success have had to make significant sacrifices that many other people would be unwilling to make. 

Whether you’re a managing director or you’re unemployed, the point is that people are irrational.

Being a managing director at an investment bank is not a rational decision because you’ve had to sacrifice 10 to 20 years of your life in order to accomplish that goal.

Remember that we are slaves to dopamine. Not everyone is going to act rationally and start selling options. 

The best thing to do is not to take any shortcuts and try to behave in a manner that sets your future self up for the highest probability of success.

Don’t act with a short-term focus. Instead, always try to keep your long-term goals in focus and behave in that manner. By doing that, you should be able to consistently earn about 3% per month by selling option premium. 

Don’t try to hit home runs and don’t try to day trade or trade Forex and engage in risky behavior.

Instead, do what many other people are unable to do.

Think of your long-term self and then work your way backwards. To figure out how to be somewhere long-term, consider what immediate steps you can take today to accomplish your goal. 

Some additional reasons why everyone won’t start selling options is that if everyone started selling options then options prices would become significantly undervalued and it would actually make sense to buy options!

If options prices were low, then the expected volatility would be less than the actual volatility, and you could profit from buying options!

Additionally, there will always be people buying, and selling, options as part of vertical credit spreads.

Learn more from David Jaffee by visiting BestStockStrategy.com. Enter your email to receive $400 worth of valuable options trading training materials.

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