The Traderszone Network

Stock trader Timothy Sykes is apparently one of the first people to sign up for a new premium Twitter service, SuperChirp, that allows publishers to charge for their twit streams. Sykes is telling his current 3,200+ followers on Twitter to sign up for his $9.99/month “premium” SuperChirp Twitterstream quickly because in his own words “…rest assured, I ain’t doing anything for $10/month, grab this deal now because I can guarantee you, my private Twitterfeed will be more like $99-$499/month.” Sykes goes on to say that he’s not exactly sure how he will integrate SuperChirp into the rest of his product offerings but he continues by saying “…prices are going up to $50/month next week in a further effort to weed out people too poor/leveraged/unfit to trade.”

Sykes, a big presence on Covestor, is obviously not without his detractors. Gawker.com columnist Ryan Tate declares SuperChirp as, “a new company [that] allows you to pay for select tweets. To prove this is a terrible idea, fallen loudmouth banker Tim Sykes has jumped on board.” Tate goes on to describe the service as “… bravely going into the business of selling access to Twitterized brain farts.” And continued by saying that Sykes ended his hedge fund career in 2007 with foolish stock bets, earning the title “Trading’s Buffoon.”

While Gawker and Sykes appear to have some history together, all bombast aside, Sykes does have a fairly impressive track record at the relatively transparent Covestor. In addition, we here at traderszone.net have long thought that Twitter, or some similar type of service, could end up being a valuable aide to investors who want access to a variety of data sources in a real-time , lightweight and low-cost manner. Perhaps this is the beginning of that evolution.

The PowerOptions blog has an interesting recent post on the Iron Condor Spread strategy. The Iron Condor is a neutral strategy where a trader combines a Bear-Call Credit Spread and a Bull-Put Credit Spread on the same underlying security. This type of trade is often used when an investor thinks the underlying may trend neutral over the life of the trade. Also, there is the potential to double the credit obtained over a single spread position.

There are two spreads involved in the strategy (four options). There is an upper break even and a lower break even. A profit is made if the stock remains above the lower break even point or below the upper break even point as evidenced by the chart.

An investor will receive a net credit from both positions. The total net credit is the max. profit. The max. profit is earned if the stock price remains above the sold put strike and below the sold call strike. The max. risk is the difference in strike prices on either spread minus the net credit.

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