An Introduction Of Sort.

My name is Peter and about 45 years ago I did a short gig as a “Merrill Lynch” Broker in Canada. I live in Ontario, about a two hour drive away from the city of Detroit. I like playing options and my focus is mainly on U.S. stocks. Prior to my gig at "Merrill" which lasted about two years I worked for another then well known Canadian brokerage firm that had a upscale office on the 55th floor of a downtown Toronto office building. They occupied the entire floor. In essence they were a "boiler room" operation with a history dating back to the 1930's. Their focus on penny mining stocks and at that time they were a major player in that space. They have since gone out of business after a branch office in western Canada made some crazy trades that ended up having them to close up shop. I am not sure what happened. It soon became apparent that my style of trading did not fit in well. I had one main client who was a mathematician I roomed with during university who gave me a weekly list of options to buy. His friends, many of whom I also knew backed him up. Other rookies (the company hired about six of us at the very same time for the first time in like twenty years) starting taking clues from me which somewhat exacerbated upper managment. I was busy watching options on stocks like Exxon and IBM options. Back then the bids and ask were much further apart. Back then Apple was a $6.00 a share. Then I transferred with the same organization to an office in another smaller city they operated where I discovered that the back office at this new location made a habit of skimming money off some of my more profitable trades. Stroke out one fill price and ink in another after consulting with the office manager who drank while at his job. Suprisingly he was good at playing squash. A fill of ten option contracts on Exxon at $3.50 would be reported back to me a $3.25. Not fun. A lady named Marilyn in the back office was doing this. I could hear her taking the fills on the phone from Toronto. It was a tight little office of about seven brokers and only two of them had offices. I did end up confronting management about this price skimming with no avail. (They didn't do skimming back at the Toronto back office, it was a much more professional operation). Then I switched to Merrill Lynch and everything there was above board. They wanted me to sell new issues. Switching companies was another story. I walked a block down the street a lunch time one day to a Merrill office where I had a friend working and was immediately interviewed by the office manager. He asked if he could call up my current manager to see how reliable I was as as an employee (that approach could have put me in a pickle but I didn't think much about it at that time). When he made the call my office manager who was also a broker with a book of business picked up the phone and was drunk. He was noticeably slurring his words. Bingo, thanks to his state of inebriation I was hired on the spot. Things were obviously different back then. I now work in an unrelated profession and oddly enough I still have the designation of being a Broker. I sell real estate. That's my story. Time flies. I still have a passion for option trading. I like Fridays for trading "one-day" options. Five of my favourite stocks to now trade options on are Caterpillar, Ford, Exxon, Tesla and Boeing, not necessarily in that order. Caterpillar actually is my least favorite one of these five stocks to trade. It can move $20.00 on the opening and often does. Catch the right direction going into a Friday morning and you can do very well. Tesla is my "go-too" stock for option trading. I also speculate in options on stocks in the "five to ten" dollar price range. They can suprise. There are times when I will take a few days off from watching the market, knowing full well that I will be not be handicapped in playing options when I return to the action. In fact I return with fresh eyes. I read Barron's on the weekend. Sometimes I wonder why I am wasting money buying it. It's getting pretty thin. I live in a city of 500,000 people and the magazine shop I buy it from on Sunday mornings only orders about seven copies of it a week. No one else in this city carries it. Sometimes I nod to other men that also happen to be buying it. I have noticed that they all seem to drive practical, uninspiring little cars and are mostly over 60. I tend to try to follow the weekly list of the most actively traded stocks. Ford is always on that list. I need to be on a routine to play options and I don't trade with other people's money. Donald Trump is helping to make option trading easier. He says things which help make the markets move. Let me now share with you what I am watching in the option markets. Some blogs are better than others. Some blogs get deleted with time. Tesla is the stock I have the most luck trading. I don't see that changing soon. I also have "Catput" hats. Cheers.