“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
– Michael Porter
Are you feeling frazzled? Tired of the ups and downs of options trading…the big wins and the sharper drawdowns? Struggling for consistency in your P&L? The problem may not be in your knowledge, your set up, your execution, or your brokerage. The problem may be your strategy. Strategy diversification is a concept taught by TastyTrade and it may have it’s place, but I think for the beginner retail options trader, it’s likely the cause of most of your problems. TastyTrade has literally put out over 100 million hours of content viewed (and I think I’m at least a million of those). The problem is information overload. We are inundated with data. If you tried to follow even the simplest of their bread and butter strategies, the Short Strangle, it quickly gets overcomplicated and can become a confusing and costly mess. Additionally, you don’t need to be trading a dozen different options strategies, particularly when you are just starting out. This will likely lead to burnout and financial loss. We live in the most data rich environment in the history of the world, and there are clearly too many options trading strategies to choose from. Open almost any trading platform, YouTube channel, Reddit community, or options education site and you will find another options strategy promising a different way to generate income or capture market movement.
Put Credit Spreads, Iron Condors, Covered Calls, Cash-Secured Puts, Put Ratio Spreads, directional option buying, day trading, swing trading, and countless variations can make trading look far more complicated than it needs to be. The natural reaction is to assume that a more sophisticated strategy must be a better strategy, but complexity and effectiveness are not the same thing. In fact, one of the most important lessons I have learned through years of options trading is that the best options trading strategy is not necessarily the one with the most moving parts; it is the one you can understand, manage, and execute consistently. That is the idea behind the Put Path approach. The Put Path Options Trading System was not designed to capture every possible opportunity the market offers. It was designed around a specific objective: use defined-risk Put Credit Spreads to create a repeatable process that emphasizes probability, capital efficiency, time efficiency, and disciplined trade management. That distinction is vital because your trading strategy should fit your life: your account size, your tolerance for risk, and the amount of time you actually want to spend watching the market. A strategy that looks excellent on paper and theoretically has the highest returns, but requires constant monitoring may be a poor strategy for someone with a full-time job. Likewise, a strategy requiring significant capital, like Cash-Secured Puts, may not make sense for a smaller account. The question becomes, “Which strategy gives me the best combination of risk, return, complexity, capital requirements, and time commitment for the way I want to trade?”
I believe the answer to that question is Put Credit Spreads. So let’s compare Put Credit Spreads with other Put-based options strategies. Selling naked Puts or Cash-Secured Puts can generate attractive premium because you are taking on substantially more downside risk, but that exposure also requires more capital and a willingness to accept larger potential losses from tail risk when the underlying stock moves sharply against you. Put Ratio Spreads introduce another layer of complexity in the set up and unlimited risk to the downside, and these typically require more active management. At-The-Money Put Credit Spreads can provide another approach to premium collection, but they generally involve a less effective balance between probability, duration, and risk. None of these strategies is inherently “bad.” The problem occurs when people choose a strategy because it sounds sophisticated or profitable without fully understanding what they are being asked to manage. This is where strategy overload can become expensive. Every additional strategy introduces another set of rules, assumptions, Greeks, entry criteria, adjustments and exit decisions. Instead of becoming really good at one strategy, you can just end up becoming mediocre at 12 different strategies. This is just the tip of the iceberg: I’m not even considering Call side strategies, Calendar Spreads, Diagonal Spreads, Jade Lizards, Butterflies, etc.
The Put Path is intentionally simple. Our world class returns are achieved even with deliberately narrowing the playing field down to one strategy. Rather than trying to predict exactly where the market will go, the focus is on selling Put Credit Spreads at defined levels, using probability as part of the decision-making process, and giving the trade a specific amount of time to work. The typical Put Path trade has roughly 28–32 days to expiration, a 15-Delta short Put, and defined downside risk through the spread structure. The objective is not to eliminate losing trades; that is impossible, but we are trying to hit our 85% POP and limit our drawdowns anywhere over the 200% stop loss trigger. Doing this over time by winning small a lot and losing small a little is the way to consistent P&L. The objective is to make the potential loss known before entering the position and then close out early if needed to prevent one trade from becoming a catastrophic event. That difference between predicting the market and managing risk is one of the most important concepts an options trader can understand.
There is also a major philosophical difference between the Put Path and directional options trading. Buying calls or Puts can provide tremendous leverage with limited capital, and when the market cooperates and makes the expected move quickly, the results can be impressive. People are posting about 10X-ing their account or getting 1,000% returns on one trade. The problem is they are only posting the winners. It’s kind of like your uncle who goes to Vegas and tells you a fun story in great detail about how he won $2,000 one night at the blackjack table. The story typically leaves out the other $5,000 that he lost that weekend and that he actually came home down three grand. It’s the same with options trading, people are making low probability trades and feeling the excitement about the big wins. However, the option buyer must be right about direction, magnitude, and the timeframe. This is a tough way to make money consistently over time. I recommend to not trade against the clock. Time is constant and controllable and time decay is working against the option buyer daily.
The Put Path approaches options from a different perspective. Instead of requiring people to correctly predict the next major market move, the strategy works to have probability and time decay on our side. That same philosophy helps explain why the Put Path is different from short-term trading or day trading. Day traders have the opportunity to make multiple trades every day and receive immediate feedback, but that opportunity comes with transaction costs, emotional pressure, screen time, and the constant requirement to make decisions. We intentionally trade less frequently and focus on higher-quality setups rather than creating more opportunities just for the sake of being active. This matters because more trading or more complex strategies do not automatically mean more progress or profit. In many cases, trading more frequently creates more opportunities to make emotional decisions, particularly when the market is moving against you. The same principle applies when comparing the Put Path with Iron Condors. Iron Condors can be moderate income-generating strategies and they benefit from time decay on both sides of the market, but they also introduce risk on both the Put and call sides. Iron Condors can require more adjustments when the underlying makes a strong directional move, particularly on the call side. The Put Path deliberately leverages its risk on the downside and uses the characteristics of Put Credit Spreads and Put Skew to maximize premium and minimize risk. That does not make it universally superior; it makes it different by design. The goal is to remove unnecessary decisions and create a framework that a trader can repeat rather than constantly reinventing the strategy. I love Iron Condors, I just trade them without the call side!
We also need to discuss the comparison between active options trading and long-term buy-and-hold investing. These approaches should not compete with each other. In fact, they are complementary and can serve completely different purposes inside the same financial plan. Buy-and-hold investing can be simple: purchase quality investments, remain invested, and allow long-term economic growth and compounding to do the heavy lifting. The trade-off is that an investor remains exposed to market downturns and must be comfortable watching the value of a portfolio decline during difficult periods. I recommend you have the majority of your investments in buy-and-hold, while setting aside a small portion of your capital for options trading (preferably in a separate account). Options trading is designed for a hedging or for making more leveraged plays. Options are more active strategies intended to generate premium income. We use defined-risk options trades while requiring considerably less day-to-day involvement than many forms of active options trading. That makes it possible to think about options trading as a separate component of a broader financial strategy, rather than something that has to replace long-term investing. This is an important distinction because the goal of the Put Path is not to convince you that options trading is the only way to build wealth. The goal is to provide a structured way for someone to generate consistent options premium income without turning their entire day into a search for the next opportunity. Our strategy may even be considered boring and I’m good with that! I’d rather be boring and profitable, than full of adrenaline and losing $. For someone with a full-time career, family responsibilities, or simply a desire to spend less time staring at a trading screen, that is a huge advantage. Time is part of the return on your strategy, not just the Theta decay but also your actual time spent trading. To me, the fewer hours trading the better. If I can trade for less than 1 hour per week, then sign me up! A strategy that produces a financial return but consumes enormous amounts of your attention and emotional energy has less overall value than a comparable return that can be managed in a fraction of the time. The reality is our strategy should give you the best of both worlds, consistent P&L and low time commitment.
Ultimately, choosing an options trading strategy comes down to deciding what you are willing to do, and what you are deliberately not willing to do. You do not need to trade every market condition, use every options strategy, or capture every possible opportunity. You do not need to predict the next market move perfectly. You need a process that matches your objectives and gives you clear rules for entering, sizing, managing, and closing trades. That is the central idea behind the Put Path. Simple does not mean easy, and defined risk does not mean no risk. It means the rules are clear enough that you can focus on execution rather than constantly searching for something new and getting confused by the myriad of options strategies out there. The goal when you trade is not to make options trading more complicated. It is to be profitable using a process easier to understand, easier to follow, and easier to fit into your life. If you want to understand how the Put Path system compares with other options strategies in more detail, watch the video above, where I walk through these differences and explain why the system is built the way it is. And if you are tired of strategy overload and want to explore a simpler, probability-focused approach to Put Credit Spreads, then join our community today. Sign up for your free membership to get access to The Real Time Trades and The Score.
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