I have been seeing advertisements for Jim Fink’s Options for Income as well as some of his other products for some time. Options for Income caught my attention the most because he said you can make $65,000.00 additional every year just by following his recommendations.
If you Don’t want to read this entire review, CLICK HERE to see our YouTube Video about Jim Fink’s Options for Income!
I have been investing a LONG time and know that most of these claims are either outright false or are at least not all they seem to be. I searched online and some decent reviews and decided to give his service a try. Most of the time I HIGHLY recommend paper trading (simulated) a new strategy whether it is yours or someone else’s before trading real money with it. However, it should be noted that in paper trading you cannot guarantee getting the same fills you would in real live. That being said, I decided to give his strategy a try using part of my real portfolio.
A couple of things up front. Jim recommends using 10 option contracts when trading his strategies, I knew I wanted to take all of his trades in the test time period and could not afford to use 10 contracts with the portion of my portfolio I was dedicating to this. I therefore traded between 2 to 4 contracts per trade. I tried to keep my average a 3 so each of the trades would have an equal effect on my overall performance. So, going into this I knew that I would probably not get the $65k he promised since I was using a smaller number of contracts.
Why did I not use 10 contracts? As stated above I did not want to dedicate that much of my portfolio to an unproven system. If Jim Fink recommended 2 trades per week, then I could assume I would have at least 8 trades per month. I assumed that most trades would take at least 60 days to end (I did not consider adjustments) so I would have about 16 trades going at any one time during the testing. If the average spread was 5 on each trade that would mean using 10 contracts I would need about $5,000.00 per trade or $80,000.00 for 16 with no room to make any adjustments. That is why I elected to trade an average of 3 contracts. IT WAS A GOOD THING I DID, since I did not even think about how adjustments would affect my risk!
One other thing I changed as I watched a few of these trades go from good to bad was I started closing profitable positions for a nominal amount when I had the chance. This should not have made any substantial difference in my results but I wanted to be 100% truthful in my review.
What problems did I run into during the testing?
- Jim Fink would recommend selling XYZ spread for $4.00 and keep moving it down every 30 mins or so until filled. I assume in his trades he is counting the position actually filling at $4.00, unfortunately that was not always the case for me and my guess is many other people.
- Roll outs! Apparently the reason Jim Fink does not lose money is because he will infinitely roll out a position increasing risk (and the amount of funds you tie up in the trade) and selling more and more and more time. One position I currently hold started out as a 60 day trade, it went bad twice and now is rolled out over 2 YEARS from today. That is right 2 YEARS! If I am lucky, 2 years from now the trade will end with a small profit. Or, maybe he will roll again to increase the return.
- Many of the positions in the Options for Income strategy go in the money. Some go in the money A LOT! Nothing sucks more than logging into your account one morning and seeing a margin call for over $20,000.00 which happened on one of the trades I traded. Yes, you have a long option position to offset it but by the come you undo the assignment and close the long option position you typically have lost more than what you thought was your maximum risk.
What about the results; that is what counts right? In my results, keep in mind, I did something which apparently Jim Fink never does, I closed some positions for a loss. Sometimes enough is enough and I do not see continuing to throw money, risk and time at a position that Jim has missed 2 or 3 times in a roll. Maybe the position will eventually be profitable but do you really want to increase the risk from $5,000 to $15,000 or move it out for over 2 years? I just don’t think that is what most of us expect when we sign up for this strategy so, I closed the craziest of the trades for a loss instead of doing what I thought was even more crazy … continue to throw money at it and hope.
The good news is that over 80% of the trades were profitable. The average time I spent in the trade (excluding ongoing trades and skipped 2 year out adjustments) was 66 days. Both of these I thought were pretty good.
The average risk I took per trade was about $1,000.00 and my average contract size was 2.6.
The problem is that the average per contract profit was $91.25 and the average per contract loss was $618.91. Therefore, even though overall 80% of the trades were profitable I still ended up with a loss during the trading period.
In Jim Fink’s defense, he would argue that I did not 100% follow his instructions, which is true. However, if you have a limited account size and/or are not 100% comfortable with trading options you are going to find it VERY difficult to follow his adjustments by increasing risk and/or selling more and more time.
I would really like to see Jim Fink’s actual fills and profit/loss on this strategy but to my knowledge he does not show that in any detail. I also noticed that when you start asking to many questions in the trade blog the moderators can become a little snippy. Yes, they are usually correct but I think they assume everyone trading the strategy is an options expert (or at least took the time to read all the blogs and instructions) but the truth is most people are looking to be spoon fed which becomes even more frantic as a trade goes bad and they begin to panic. As I read some of the subscriber’s comments I could feel their pain as they saw trades going bad and even more so when they were unexpectedly assigned. I think the moderators have forgotten what it feels like when you are not 100% sure what to do.
Bottom line, is Jim Fink’s Options for Income a SCAM? Probably not. At least in the truest definition.
I would say that without A LOT of research most people would not understand the risk and account size needed to get the results he promises.
This is a trading plan that requires you to know a lot about options to really feel comfortable.
Although I cannot call this a SCAM, I also cannot in good faith recommend it to someone who does not fully understand options. This is not an easy get ‘X’ return on your money type of system. Even in systems that work you need to make sure you really understand them. If you don’t you will not know if they are performing correctly, before huge losses. You also will not know how to defend them.
I will close by saying this again in fairness to Mr. Fink, I did not 100% follow his recommendations for the reasons I have already stated above. However, I would really like to know what HIS fills and actually results are.
2/1/2019 UPDATE: Please take the time to read the comments below. We have gotten A LOT of good response from this article. So much so that we put a video of the review on YouTube. You can find the link to that above.
Most of the comments we have gotten about Jim Fink’s Options for Income have be consistent with our initial article. We just did the YouTube video a few days ago so we tried to focus on some of the issue we had with Jim Fink’s Options for Income as well as include a summary of what many of our visitors have said.
One thing we said in our Video is that we thought there were better options if you wanted to trade options similar to Jim fink’s Options for income. One is Skyview Trading and the other is Trade4Profts. Both of these programs trade a lot of probability based options. Although, Jim Fink, does not identify his strategy as probability based we find a lot of similarities in the way he trades and the way Skyview and Trade4Profits trade.
We are not recommend either of these or any others for that matter. We just want to make sure you research other option for income types of strategies before you comment your hard earned funds.
Remember: Always Paper/Virtual Trade any strategy before you use it.
Great Books on Options Trading – Click on Book Cover to see more information:
thank you for being frank and honest, not much of that going around these days.
You are welcome. We try to be as honest as possible in our reviews. Try to keep out personal feelings and just focus on the product. We also try to make sure we do not divulge any proprietary information concerning the things we review. This means we cannot always say ‘everything’.
Let us know if you have any other questions.
Thank you for your honest and invaluable insight into Jim Fink’s service.
You are welcome. We try to be as impartial as possible while still giving a useful review.
There is no such thing as consistently beating the market especially if you don’t have tons of money to throw in and adjust your positions and mitigate your risks. If this were this simple wouldn’t you think the bulge bracket trading desks would. It be utilizing these strategies? In fact, they most likely are but they have the backing of large monies, extremely fast software and extremely efficient networks to the exchanges.
What he describes is common knowledge if you have ever been involved in equity and options trading.
I would not recommend someone blindly following these trades.
You may think you will get your 39.95 refund but you could be in the whole in the thousands. the video does not specify what moneys he is playing with and I am not sure if 5is is not a subscription each month of 39.95.
You may win 99.9% of the time and have it wiped out by that 0.01% exposure in a heartbeat.
Would have helped for Jim to say how much he is risking and what his ROI is so that people can see if they can scale and make it worthwhile. You definitely will not be making 65K on a 100 or 200K investment…
Be prudent, it’s your money!
During our trading we noticed what you mentioned. Although we did not 100% follow his recommendations due to time and risk increases we did see that the vast majority of the trades we participated in were successful. The problem was the small number of losers were very large. Overall we did not do well.
Mr roberts do you think tjat if you had followed jim finks system to the T as a small investor would it bring the terms he is talking about
Following him exactly probably would make a difference, the problem is would it have been better or worse. We decided not to 100% follow because trades were moving against us. We would not recommend this service for a small or novice investor.
Although over 80% of the trades were winners, the losses we took were so large that did not matter. As a small investor you will have to pick and choose which of his trades you take. If you are unlucky you could find yourself in a trade that lasts a year or more or even that wipes your account.
It is also difficult to get the entry points he suggests in real life. I would have to research to see just how often we got the same fill he did but even if you can get his fill 50% of the time which is probably pretty good you might still find yourself trading one of the unlucky ones since you won’t be taking all of them.
Thanks for the honest review.
No problem. We try to be honest and fair when reviewing any product or service. We realize there are a lot of honest people out there trying to offer a good service. We believe that is the intention of Mr. Fink, we don’t think the service is a scam, just don’t think it is right for many of the people who stumble across the service and don’t understand the risks or capital actually involved to get the results he discusses.
Hi John, I thought that if the stock price does happen to fall below the option “strike” price, you would then just buy the stock at that price. Then just sell it later on when the price goes up. Am I right? I am a novice investor and want to understand the system.
If the price of the underlying stock falls below the option price (strike) of the one you are short (or sold) then you have to purchase the stock at the option strike price. For instance if you sold an option on XYZ at $40.00 while XYZ was trading at $42.73 for $1.73 then you are hoping that XYZ stays above $40.00 until your short position expires. If it does then you get to keep your $1.73. However, if the stock drops to $32.25 and you did nothing to close the position before hand then you would lose $40.00 (strike) minus $32.25 (current price) plus $1.73 (price you got to sell the option) or $6.02 per share. On a standard 100 share contract that would be $602.00 per contract.
This is a simple example. Please DO NOT trade options until you really understand them. They are my preferred investment tool but you must understand how they work.
Check out trade4profits.com for some more information and book recommendations.
Hey … although true thats a big move in a $40 stock loosing almost a 25% over a trade period.
Did any of his picks go in the money then out? Just curious…
Also were they all just collecting premium
During our test many went in the money and a larger than we would have preferred were assigned, which can give you a BIG scare when you get that margin call email from your trading company. Of course, you can unwind the position and get out of the margin call but you will normally take larger losses than you thought were your max loss because of the the bid/ask spread on ‘in the money’ and ‘near the money’ options.
Hi John, you didn’t address Frances’s point: when ITM, just buy the underlying at Strike price. Oh boy, my dear Frances, it would require you to come up $40/share x 100shares/contract x 10 contract = $40,000! Good if you have tons of money and trading Options is your fun hobby, you won’t mind to wait 6 months for it to come back, if lucky.
However if your trading a $5 spread wouldn’t your loss be the $5 spread minus the $1.73 you got for selling the spread for a total loss of $4.27 or $427 per contract.
Yes, if you have a $5 spread then if everything went completely against you, you would loss the $5 minus what ever credit you got when you entered the trade. In your example ($5.00-$1.73) $3.27 or $327.00 per contract would be correct.
It sounds exciting. Would love to try but have no knowledge of the system. Wish they had a simple class
to learn how. Always wanted to learn but working, raising famiy, health issues now. Wish everyone luck. Keep sharing. Will keep trying to figure out. Need mentor.??
Based on what you wrote, we don’t recommend the system for you. Please be sure to carefully read our review and the feedback on our site like yours. This is not a easy/make money/trade and forget system.
try tastytrade.com … basically a free options college level website. Thats where i learned
Did you get the refund. I just signed up for his $39:95 service and then hit the upsell pop up for the $695 options for income with recommendations every Thursday .
Weir thing is I was just browsing after pop up and didn’t realize it was still active and inadvertently signed up for it.
Now I want out and the 809 number is nit working in weekends.
Did you get a refund on this
We did not ask for a refund. In fact we are still following while our year finishes up. Our option of the service has not changed.
Hello John
Thank you for the information on Jim Fink option trading. Am completely new on this type of investment and the infor you provided actually restrained me from signing on. I saw your forum when i went to google Jim Fink to get more fact about him, my question is i reside in Canada but am looking for an investment opportunity that can keep me going. I am over 50years and has little fund to turn around. Do you have any suggestion for me please and thank you.
We don’t really have any suggested programs we are promoting right now. However I would recommend as a safer and easier to learn strategy focusing on covered calls. You can also trade iron condor’s using this book: Profiting with Iron Condor Options: Strategies from from the frontline for trading in up or down markets.
The author offers a good rule based system. However, don’t get overexposed. Even though his strategy is pretty safe a huge move in the market can get you into trouble fast.
Thank you very much for your honest and detailed review. It really helps!!
No problem. We have been there as well.
Buy Low us the 8/21 ema on charts and pick high volume stocks on a daily and you will get the same returns as this idiot is promising. Plus you will not be sitting in large loses when you only risk 1% of your capitol. Go a few months out or next month out at ATM or slightly in the money with the option Too
This system he is selling for 39.95 is all about selling options, is he talking about naked puts or what kind of option selling is he talking about? Right now I buy options but never sold them. Thanks in advance.
In the system we reviewed he did not take naked puts. Depending on your option level let me further explain. He does sell puts and calls but purchases other puts and calls further out of the money to cover them. Therefore, limiting your risk to a known amount. Based on the fact that you have not sold options in the past we would not recommend this strategy for you. We really feel you need a VERY good knowledge of options before you attempt to use his system.
Then, ALWAYS paper trade first. Keep in mind if you cannot make it work paper trading you will never make it work with real money. Also remember that even if you have some success paper trading, trading with real money is different because your fills WILL BE worse.
thanks, keep reading.
Boyofmetal- can you explain what you wrote in plain English for those of us who are new to this?
I have been investing for 9 years, actively managed fund of funds tracking S&P 500 (80%-90%) plus a basket of bonds rated A to just above junk (10-20%), and have done very well since 2009. More than doubled my initial investment. But that approach takes time. A lot of time. The rule of 72 tells me I’m averaging over 11% annually, net of fees. But I’m interested in alternative investments that I can carry out myself that are short term.
hi, today received the jim fink video for options, sounds good , looks genuine however after reading your take on it , i always look for reviews, thankfully i will not be investing in personel finance options
Yes, they all sound great. In our opinion, you would need a large portfolio and a REALLY good understanding of options before you used Mr. Fink’s service. We understand how his system works, it is based on some very basic principles. However, as we stated in our review, we did not get the results he spoke of and found that it would take a large account to take all his trades. Even then, we struggled to get his fills.
After spending 50k in my education ( losses ) and trading with real money this is my conclusion:
if you want to be successful. you need 3 things.
1) Learn to take losses and accept it as a cost of doing business. Know your risk and accept it before hitting that button.
2) Educate yourself and devise your own strategy that fits your personality and keep improving on it. Listen to others for ideas but in the end what will work for you is what comes out of you.
3) Discipline is the key. Your first objective is to preserve capital. Remember the 90/90/90 rule. 90% of traders lose 90% of their account in first 90 days.
If you want someone to be spoon feed you for the rest of your life, you are his mercy. He feeds you honey or poison you will never know until it is too late. Trading is a very hard job but it is doable.
MONEY CAN BUY HAPPINESS IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO SHOP :))
We agree.
Thanks for the information
what about CHUCK HUGHES – HUGHES OPTIONEERING service ?
We have not reviewed that one yet. It is one the list. One of our reviewers had reached out to them but we have not followed up yet.
This article, in fractured English, boils down to:
“I was afraid to spend sufficient funds to pursue Fink’s strategy, and as a result, I failed to profit.”
Sometimes throwing more money into a system is not the answer. However, I agree that you would need a substantial investment to effectively use Mr. Fink’s strategy.
Dear John Roberts / Admin,
I checked Amazon the 2011 published “Profiting with Iron Condor Options: Strategies from the Frontline for Trading in Up or Down Markets (Paperback)” , so you suggest Iron Condor is the best option strategy and this 2011 book is the best source to learn from? I appreciate your view.
The system described in the book still works. In fact I use a slight variation of it myself. To me the biggest thing when trading Iron Condors is to stick with the indexes and FOLLOW THE RULES. Rules are there to protect you from emotion when trading.
Al these people are scammers who take advantage of people. Think about it. They know if you are contacting (or they are contacting you) that you don’t have the knowledge or experience to trade these instruments and they know you want to believe it’s easy to do so they sell you a dream. If they could make money the way they say so easy why would Jim Fink be wasting his time trying to get $39 out of every Tom Dick and Harry out there. He would just make a few million dollars using his strategy and then go sip Margaretta’s out on the Fiji Islands somewhere. And maybe he’d just make 10 million more and then post the way he does it for free for everyone to see if he really cared about you. Don’t be so gullible to think he’s out there just trying help out his fellow man. I get e-mails from him all the time stating he has 2 more spots left on some live webinar to teach me how to make me millions however I have to answer to “reserve my spot” within 2 hours. I click on the thing 2 weeks later and am sent to the webinar ha ha (wow how lucky was I)
I know about these strategies and they can work. They however require much study, some luck, and favorable market conditions. His sell a call and a put and purchasing a call and put far out of the money (to insure the trade) in order to work requires a sideways market neither up or down and like the reviewer stated making a few bucks on 10 or 20 trades and then getting hammered on 1 that wipes out all of your profits that is of course in fact if it happens in that order. There is some money in options because of inefficient markets but as time goes on there is less and less. 15 years ago it was much easier to make money in options as the market was much more inefficient in calculating option values. Option prices changed 5 to 20 minutes following stock price changes know it takes seconds . You can put up an option chain next to a stock price nowadays and the option value goes up and down within nano seconds of the stock price.
There is some honest guys out there and I use them. It’s called power options. There strategy is to make sure not to lose money 1st by purchasing a stock and then buying a 6 months to 1 year out in the money put. Officially it’s called a married put. They put a curve on it though that makes it so you can sell calls for the next year or just hold the stock using there strategies you can usually make the trade bulletproof within a month meaning there is no way you can lose and now you own the stock for free for the next 4 months to up to a year af depending on the put purchased It’s called radioactive trading. It’s not easy requires time some money and patience lots of schooling but you can make money. They’ve been in business since 1997 that I know of and once you join for cheap money you can get live phone coaching from one of their staff anytime and they really try and teach you how to trade. go to : poweroptions.com Tell them Elmer sent you
Thank you Elmer-your comments about why would somebody who had a fool proof system fool around with the public instead of just retiring on his winnings is just common sense–
I am very interested, the problem I have is that when I sign up for something then I get a whole lot of other emails and that confuses me to no end. I would like more information to varify that this is trust worthy.
We do not recommend any systems. Only give you the best information we can. I will say as we have previously stated, I do not recommend Mr. Fink’s system unless you REALLY understand options. Remember, almost nothing delivers as described.
I was one of the first five to join Jim’s service back in April, 2011. Made a net profit of nearly a quarter of a million dollars my first four years. Note: that was on closed trades only and didn’t include losses on another 20 or so trades that were in the red but still open. I began trading one contract, moving up to 8-10 over that time.
Since 2015, I have pretty much broke even. During this time, I continue doing most new trades while working out of about two-thirds of those old trades. I also have cut the size of each trade in half. When working myself out, I don’t follow his recommendations and frequently close for losses. I work like hell, however, to keep those losses as small as possible.
Much of what you say is accurate, especially related to Jim’s method of keeping losing trades alive seemingly forever. He regularly expands spreads by doubling the spread and/or flipping a put spread to a debit call spread. So anyone who follows his system taking all trades needs to understand they will eventually have 40 or more open trades with perhaps a quarter or third using margin/cash of double or more than what you began with.
I don’t understand your comments about fills because Jim preaches using limit orders at his recommended price. I always get filled at that price, unless the market runs away at which time I will have a no-fills. But that doesn’t happen all that often.
I remain a member of OFI, although I do more trading using a program I have developed. Is it a scam? Not in my opinion. Last I checked, I have earned a return of about 12% since OFI began which is on over 500 trades.
Thanks for you input.
When we refer to fills we mean that in his system he calculates profits based on the target price, not the actual fill price. Therefore, if you are making a decision on how profitable the system is based on the listed trades you should be aware that you may not get those fill prices.
You are correct about the limit orders, which is fine if you are opening a position. However the trade you miss because you don’t get filled may be the one Jim shows as his biggest gainer. A trade you could not get filled on.
Another problem if you are already in a trade, you have to adjust/close regardless of what fill price you get. Yes you have about 24 hours to ‘play’ with your limit order but ultimately you MUST take action. It does not matter what limit Jim says is the target.
When Jim calculates his profits he assumes that fill was at target, not even at the high end of his initial limit. However, you may have had to close at a much worse position depending on how ‘in the money’ the position is and the bid/ask spread.
We still stand by our review.
Thanks a lot, John, for your comment of Jim’s system. I was going to pay a few hundred dollars for follow him if not have read your information. You are right his system is not for everyone , especially those without large fund to follow him 100%. I think Jim should tell people that his system is not for all, and give infomation to size of the fund one has to have in order to be able to play the game. Just wonder if I can get my $39 something back. Thanks again for your view in this issue.
David
Australia
We would love to see his actual, verified fills and trades. Not sure you can get your $39.00 back, but at least you did not lose much.
I have been invoiced about $600 and have not received anything………..
You should be getting email’s at least once a week on trades. If not, you can go the website, login and see the recent trades. You really need to find out why you are not getting the emails though. That being said, make sure you read our review. This program IS NOT for everyone.
Thanks soooooo much for the review….If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not. I was very much interested but, seen this game before. I ALWAYS look for reviews now, and I realize this offer is NOT for me
His system was not for us either. I am sure Jim Fink is very knowledgeable but his system just did not give us the overall results we where looking for.
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We have always stayed away from binary options. They remind us too much of going to the casino.
I have examined the Jim Fink trading method. He sells put credit spreads at 25 to 40 delta 30-90 days to expiration. This is a strategy that will always have you fully loaded in long directional trades, with massive negative vega. He advises hold all trades until expiration, A terrible idea that goes against how most pros trade. You will profit until you dont in an uptrend. At some unknown point in time a big down move will occur. Then if you hold your positions, you will lose more than half your account. So this is not a viable way to trade, run dont walk from this.
We agree and experienced this very problem. The winning percentage was great but the losses and increased risk on losing trades can get much larger than the wins. Think of it like this if you win 85% of the time for $10.00 each that is great, unless the 15% losses are $5000.00 each. We exaggerated to make a point.
After 50 years in the markets and doing a lot of other things what you see here is consistent with the real world. Everyone seems to want to make money as that is the US standard and Identifies who you are. Poor choice but that raises the living standard. My experience shows 1. The most money you can make is if you have a lot of money and give it to one of six tier one platforms to trade. The US treasury had a program of doubling your money everyday. Most people do not know what a platform is and it is reserved for the very right opening with 100 million dollars to start. 2. The markets are 100% predictable and this has been proven by such traders as W.D. Gann. 3. I have found the best method is line break charts and it only took 10 years to get it with 300% returns over a year, but placed that on hold to offer a cure for cancer, but the deep state does not want a cure for cancer which has been available for 100 years. Trading is not for amateurs. The hook is how do you become a professional? It is sort of like Dr.s they are the third cause of death in the country behind heart disease and cancer but you still go to them. You need a job in the industry or one individual that will share his success with you-good luck. These schools that teach trading have a poor record and the last report on them was none made money for their students. Take a computer course for your future and in trading remove time as a factor. Trade the price not the time.
There are very few online trading schools we have actually liked. Certainly we have not looked at all of them but we would recommend the TradePro Academy swing trader courses. They offer a futures day trading course as well but it is for someone more advanced and that wants to trade everyday. Their foundations course and swing trader course is actually very good, especially for the price. They are not trying to rip you off.
I am fairly new to the stock market,trading and selling as well as buying! one thing I’m an African-american and this world is kind of closed off to us rather it seems we’ll more recognized by homicides gang violence and the constant mishap that goes on within our communities especially involving law enforcement being shot and killed while unarmed to begin with.I just want to make a reasonable gain here as I have no money to be wasting or spending on non-sense! I’ve got to know some very successful traders and brokers and they all says proceed very cautiously there’s lots of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
If you are new, this system is NOT for you. There are much better (and safer) way to start out. The three we actually consistently use are consistently use are covered calls, covered calls using all options (diagonals) and condors on SPX.
Gees I’m glad to have read your fair and logical ctitique on Fink’s Option System before I subscribed to it.
I saw his same video about a year ago when I knew little or nothing about selling options…I was tempted and intrigued, but held off joining.
Now after studying up on options and selling credit spreads etc i particular…. even funding an account with Tasteworks after paper trading a bit on the Think Or Swim platform…I reviewed his video offer again today and was pleased I didn’t join for almost all the reasons you give.
I’m so glad to find someone like yourself who hasd actually tried Finks system and I’m ever grateful to learn from your costly mistakes. Many thanks …Les.
No problem, thanks for leaving a comment. Jim’s system just wasn’t for us. The success rate was really good, but you can only roll a loss and take more risk so many times before you are endangering your account. Plus, we rarely got the fills he shows.
If you sell a put and consecutively buy a lower put you create a credit put spread. Your risk as noted elsewhere is the price gap of the puts (10 points = $1000 per contract and so forth) less the spread premium received. The gain and the loss are capped but once the sold put is assigned you will have to come up with the funds to buy the stock. You can sell it right away or wait in case the stock reverses in your favor but you have to have the cash ready. That’s one reason why the losses and anxiety can be outsized compared to the profits when the trade goes against you.
Fink makes it sound way too easy. His video this morning was about an hour long to finally get to the point of asking for $39.95. Duh! Hello! Why is this guy supposedly with a Masters Harvard dork around with this?????because lots of suckers will bite. I used his Options for Income service for some time. I probably broke even. Lots of his spread trades did not fill. He is great at Rolling the option it seems. I canceled the service and definitely would not recommend it to people who are not extremely well versed in options. IMHO, Fink is in love with himself too much. I got much better trades using Schwab’s Idea Hub for “premium hunting” and better and more profitable trades from Options Play.
He is now guaranteeing $67,000 annual profit if you give him 9 minutes a week. It’s tempting to take him up on this and then sue him when he does not pay up as guaranteed.
I would really want to see the fine details of that guarantee. Also, how much capital he expects you to commit to making $67000.00. If you will give me $10 million of your money I will guarantee you a return of $67,000.00 per year. I might even do it for $5 million…..
Since the consensus is that Fink’s way is not really profitable overall, someone had mentioned covered calls, covered calls using all options (diagonals) and condors on SPX are much safer.
Can anyone expound on this some more? How safe are these strategies? How much profit can you expect? What about selling options instead of buying? What are profit expectations for this?
All system have risk. We prefer diagonals to covered calls because you get a better return on risk. Also love Iron Condors on SPX, they work great 80% of the time. Below is a website you can go to for some good books on investing.
https://trade4profits.com/books
any info yet on Chuck Hugues? He seems a serious /knowledgeable guy.
John Roberts,
I was just billed over $500 by Options for Income via my debit card.
I’m trying to locate contact information for this group….can you help.
I don’t want the service, and definitely do not want to pay for it.
Any thoughts will be much appreciated.
Richard Hyatt (301)641-0294.
I have a friend that knows mr fink s. He said in a poker game it would cost more money for them to try to get there $39 back. This came out of finks mouth at the table. Another person asked him how many people ask for there money back. And he said about 10 percent of them. And 60 percent don’t even try. They just chalk up the money as a lost because it was to hard 4 them. Thats free money he said with a smile. He also said this game cost a lot of money to play. Some people just can’t hang. 90 percent of them don’t have the balls to do it step by step so they give up and I get my 39 bucks. Regardles Another person ask how many people order ur advice. Or whatever ur selling them. He said enough. Another person said does it work. Can people make that kind of money. He said “yes” he backs his product 100% it’s just hard u really got to understand options. It’s not 4 everyone.
I will say it. Jim Fink is a scammer. His promo videos are not at all what you get when you sign up. They reference specific trades but after you sign up, you are told those are not a part of the program. He presents a “can’t lose” approach when all he does he roll over and over and over. He never “loses” because of this strategy. One of the last rolls I did was so in the negative that each contract was going to cost $20,000 to roll. Unless you have literally millions to invest, no way to maintain this constant losing and rolling. It’s like he is just guessing(and is wrong more than right) and then guesses again. You can tell who is drinking the kool aid too as there are people on his board continuously thanking him for all of his help. Utter crap. Do not fall for it folks!
Hello, I appreciate the review and was curious if you have come across anything that would lean towards beginners with a smaller account. Any info would be great. Thank you.
Learning is the best advice we can give you. If you do use someone else’s service then make sure you understand the risk and PAPER TRADE FIRST! Also, remember that if you use a ‘proven’ system there will be times when it does not work based on market conditions. We use an Iron Condor SPX trading system that works great about 80% of the time. But, when the market stops range trading and starts making wild moves, hold on and defend, defend, defend. Our SPX system is like a money machine most months but can wipe you out if you don’t pay attention to the changing market.
After reading the above comments, I’m wondering if Fink’s system is for me.
I am retired and living on a limited income. Of course, my anxiety issues are: will I be able to outlive my retirement income?? I do have options to counteract this: selling my property or taking out a reverse mortgage. I would prefer not to do either option.I lost half of my retirement income in the Great Recession in 2008-09. We all suffered so what else is new?
So, Jim’s strategy sounded feasible to me. I’ve read over all the comments pros and cons of about his strategies and now am wondering if this is right for me. I have 2 brokerage accounts.Needless to say, I only have a limited amount of funds to try out his strategies….$1000 max to start with…at this time in my life ,I wish to “test the waters” .
Is this right for me?
I am late to this thread but do not try Jim Fink’s system with a small account. Because of the rolls and need to add capital at times, the general guidelines is to have 20-30K available to trade one contract for each recommendation. You might be able to get by with 10-15K if you only trade half of Jim’s recommendations, but no way a $1000 would be enough.
You are absolutely correct! We saw the same thing when we were trading/reviewing Jim Fink’s Options for Income. Your exposure can quickly grow.
A covered call = a naked put.
I am a retired long-time investor with a decent portfolio of 55-60 stocks. I use options frequently with stocks if I want to buy (I’ll sell a naked Put), or if I want to sell (I’ll sell a covered Call). Also, I will use Call options if I want to speculate on a stock. I had never used Spreads.
I consider myself a knowledgeable investor, but not a day trader.
I joined Jim Fink’s Option for Income in late August, 2018. I followed all of his recommendations and made all the trades except four of them, which I could not get filled, even after his 8-day waiting period and lowering the credit several times. I traded only one option contract each time, because I want to see whether the trades really are successful before I risk more money and tie-up more funds on margin. I have plenty of cash in my account to handle the margin and the losses.
Here’s my results so far:
– I quickly realized he does not account for the cost of making a Spread trade, which for me is $5-$6 each time. He recommends not going below $85 for a net credit on a trade because the % profit is not good enough below $85. But that translates to about $90 for me because of my cost.
– some of my trades did not get exactly the same credit he supposedly got, or at least told me to trade for. Often I would get $10-$25 less after 8 days of waiting. On his roll “net debits” I often had to pay a higher price as well.
– so far two trades expired for a profit – $118.68 and $93.68.
– three of the Spreads had stock prices that went so low, I was assigned the stock before I could follow his instructions to roll it. I had to use the protection side of the Spread to sell it at a loss of either $500, or $1,000. Those trades lost the Spread ($500 or $1,000) minus the credits I got when I placed the trades. So, I lost $300-$400 on a $500 Spread that got assigned. Again, he rolled the trades, so I guess he never gets stocks assigned before expiration?
– eight of the trades were rolled to a later date, all of which cost more money and wiped out the initial credit I received. I don’t know how many of those will turn a profit, or be rolled again.
– if you post any thoughts on their site that might be considered even a tiny bit negative, your post will get deleted – even if it’s just factual data. They deleted this note when I posted it. They will also change your posts to correct them, or modify what you say or ask.
I’m not worried or scared. I’m relatively optimistic, and $3,000-$4,000 won’t send me to the poorhouse. I plan to continue to follow the plan that I paid for. We’ll see if I eventually turn a profit. I do realize this is a tough market for bull spreads, which is what most of the trades are.
Also, the 30-day guarantee period is useless when the trades are at least 6-8 weeks in the future. They did offer an opportunity to extend that period, but that was before I knew what kind of trades I’d be making, so I had no reason to ask for an extension.
I can wait this out. It’s interesting and informative, so I’m good.
Tom
I joined Jim Fink’s “Option for Income” plan in late August. I am a retired investor, not a day trader. I have above average knowledge of the market and investing. I use my own Puts (for stocks I’d like to own at a lower price), and Calls (Covered for stocks I’d like to sell, Naked for growth stocks I think will go up). I usually make an additional $1,500-$2,000 a year with my Options.
Until I joined his program, I had ever used Spreads, which is what he does most of the time.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
• He does not consider any cost to make trades, so you always receive a lower credit on Spreads, and pay a higher debit on Rolls. Therefore, his profit % is always higher than actual.
• On some of his suggested trades I could not equal his recommended dollar amount and had take a lower Credit or pay a higher Debit.
• Even though a Spread trade has a built-in safety dollar limit, any loss you have to take (on assigned stocks), are two to three times as much as the gains you get on expired spreads. So, the “80% win rate” he gets is tempered by the amount of the wins vs. the amount of any losses.
• It appears he never gets assigned on a Spread trade, even when the prices have dropped way below a “win”, and are deep “in the money”. He always just Rolls the trade, which, of course, you cannot do if you have been assigned the stock and have to use your safety Put to reduce your loss. I suspect his trades are just paper trades, not real ones; so, he never takes the loss you have to take. That would also explain how he always gets his recommended prices.
• He has a website where all the “customers” can post comments and questions. But be aware that your comments will be edited and changed; and, no comment is allowed if it is even a tiny bit negative or questioning.
I will probably play out the deal I made by joining, but I don’t expect to make very much money doing it. I have plenty of cash available to handle the margin requirements, and I realize the present market is a tough one to trade Bull Spreads, which is what he does most of the time. I can afford to try the system, and I am learning a lot about trading. Also, I trade only one contract each time, unless I like a particular trade and it involves a stock I’m familiar with.
Tom
Michigan
Thanks for the quality reply.
You are so right about everything. I invested $100,000 and lost 50% in less than 3 years. Fink either has a paper account that he calls his “portfolio” or he has unlimited funds to keep rolling these trades..in which case eventually, the trades probably turn positive. MOst of us are out of money long before then.He is arrogant, and will not tolerant even the least dissatisfaction with a trade. My question was ” when is it best just to get out of a trade that has gone bad continuously? I’ve lost $20K on one trade.” He froze my account and I could not ask anymore questions. I had very few trades that had rolled several times that ever turned positive.
THANK YOU, SO MUCH!!
I have to “SIT DOWN!!” and thing it over !!! more than one !!!!
Then!
To make my desition
Thanks for all of the info. This is not for me, at least for now. I do subscribe Personal Finance for his month recommendations there. These are covered writes and cash covered put sales. I have found it profitable but took a big loss in the September to Christmas correction. I should have punched out of those two trades. But, most trades were profitable but not big time is claimed for his expensive Options for Income plan.
Most strategies took a hit during that time period. We have been following Trade4Profits.com and even some of their direction neutral strategies struggled during that time period. The advantage to their direction neutral strategies as opposed to a covered call or naked put is you have a firm idea on what your loss will be when things go bad.
Jim Fink grossly inflates his results. If you keep rolling a trade, this requires money. This money doesn’t go into his calculation for returns. He only uses the initial capital. So, really, the return is less than 100%. The rolling he suggests is VERY risky, but he never tells you this.
He advertises a Total Profits Summit where he promises one of his stock picks will go up 1,000% in a year. He made this same guarantee for 5 stock picks late March 2018 with his Wealth Alliance subscription, and none of those 5 stocks are anywhere near 1,000% gain today. In fact, none of those stocks are at even 100% gain! The largest gain on any stock pick in Wealth Alliance today is 29%. That’s it! 29%. Two of those initial 5 stock picks have gone down in value!
He makes the same bogus claims about Velocity Trader and Profit Catalyst Alert. Beware!
Happy trading.
We have not looked at his other products but promising 1000% returns is pretty crazy. No one is that good.
Thank you very much for your commentary on this investment program.
Mr.Finch’s strategy pretty well wiped out my 25K margin account. I am a novice trader and followed the advice blindly. The 2 factors that are NOT plainly outlined in the strategy are that you are risking up to 10 times the possible ROI when rolling the failed trades and secondly, you should allow a 5K to 10K margin for every trade you get into which means a 25K account should never trade more than 3 to 5 of these trades at one time. I was doing pretty well with the strategy until the flash crash of last December. That’s when I got wiped out in a matter of months. Thanks for your evaluation. I wish I had seen it a year ago.
Sorry to hear that. There are some good programs out there, but they all lose money from time to time. No trader is 100%. I really hate the ones that just lie or don’t properly explain the risks.
I have never understood the people who sponsor these sites that supposedly help you make a lot of winning trades: FOR A HEFTY FEE. ( In this case $2000 or thereabouts).
If they have a winning strategy, why do they need to run a service that helps me and other people make money? If they had a foolproof system would they bother with all of us.
I have directed this question to many of these sites and NEVER received an answer.
I have tried to answer this question for a long time to no avail. And they continue advertising themselves. Since I do not think they are all scams: is there a logical explanation to my question?
I traded Jim Fink’s program for three years and lost a lot of money. My ratio of wins to losses was over 70% with an average profit of $1.91 on the winners but the problem is the average loss on losing trades was over $8. Jim Fink does not believe in cutting losses. I was in a position for three years with losses totaling $43 per share. Simple math tells me it would take over 22 trades at my average of $1.91 just to cover the loss. Yet, he is still recommending the trade be rolled into new positions. I asked about his trade management guidelines and was told to keep absorbing losses in hope the stock would turn around some day. What kind of strategy is that? I might as well go to Vegas and take my chances there. This during the greatest bull market we’ve ever seen. Imagine what happens when when the market shifts. This guy talks a good game but watch out.
I had the same experience.
Thank You so much for a comprehensive and two sided honest review. I feel that I am well enough informed by your review and the comments of others here to make a decision about Jim’s prposed strategy as it applies to me.
good luck
What are you doing now based on the coronavirus the stock market going Bear? Are you trading? Selling Puts? Spreads or what? I would appreciate your input I wish to trade again I stopped for quite a while and the Algorithm have so changed. Any advise.
Thank you.
How do I contact Jim Fink
Hi John, thanks for your honest comments on the Jim Fink system, I was tempted to give it a go, but fortunately read your review before I committed.
Just wondering if you have ever reviewed any of the following?
Netpicks.
Top Dog Trading with Barry Burns
Josh Martinez
Rob Booker
Regards Peter Simpson
Thanks for the comprehensive and honest article; I just got a marketing come-on from Fink and forgot why I stopped following his newsletter 2 years ago … when i paper investigated his trades they were not as successful as he claimed they would be! I have played options with my own strategy for the last 2 years to gain some extra cash; my approach takes a lower risk/lower exposure. One thing i have learned since playing options is that every strategy is based on some model of the market — for myself, my method works as long as the market keeps steady or increasing over a 4-10 week window. so i stopped in Feb with the erratic swings due to Covid. Waiting for the economy and Covid to stabilize before diving back in again
I am recently retired and wanted to supplement my income . I fell for Mr. finks program stating I could turn 5000 into 225000 in a years time following his system. I paid 2000 up front to join and I dont know anything about option trading.But after reading your comments I can see this is not for me I dont have that porfolio you need to succeed.Just wanted to vent I guess.
I’ve used Jims options for income for almost two years and what i believe is that some of his weekly picks are not set up to have success in the near future and although he picks strong company’s i personally don’t have the patience to wait for the price of the stock that usually has already peeked and that’s not a bad thing for the strength of the company but for us short term investors usually it takes a few months to climb back above the entry price and then were rolling it further ahead . for the novice investor it becomes extremely confusing.
All i can say is that Jim knows way more about trading spreads then ill ever know and I believe he isn’t trying to scam anyone but it isn’t as easy making the money he says you can without a lot of trial and error especially for a novice trader that doesn’t really understand what there doing.