I have recently heard from several subscribers of my new Mad Options Trader (MOT) service that they have earned enough in their first three weeks to cover it's cost FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS!

?Whiz?, who runs MOT for me, has certainly had a hot hand, with almost every trade turning immediately profitable.

At the request of several members, I have therefore conducted an audit of the long term trading performance of the Mad Options Trader.

The numbers blew my mind.

Since May 20, 2014, the Mad Options Trader has delivered A STUNNING 214.71% PROFIT, net of fees.

This is during a period when the overall market performance was essentially zero.

That is far better than my own numbers, but then ?Whiz? is much more aggressive and using more leverage over a shorter time frame than I am.

Chalk my cautiousness up to my advanced age. I am too old to start over again as a junior trader at Morgan Stanley, as if they would have me back.

Still, you now have your choice of winners, Mad Options Trader up +214.71% in 27 months, or Mad Hedge Fund Trader up +201.65% in 69 months.

You are spoiled for choice. It doesn?t get any better than that in the trading world.

I take great pleasure in pointing out that Whiz and I provide the only trade mentoring services that publish audited performance on a daily basis.

NONE OF THE OTHERS DO BECAUSE THEY ALL LOSE MONEY!

Believe me, if they HAD decent performance to report, it would be in your inbox every morning. Their silence speaks volumes.

I should take this opportunity to remind you that your free subscription to the Mad Options Trader expires in only one week, on August 31.

After that, the service will only be available as a $1,500 upgrade to your existing Mad Hedge Fund Trader service.

Nancy is taking orders now. You can email her directly with your request at support@madhedgefundtrader.com.

SPECIAL NOTE: Because of the urgency and frequency of the Mad Options Trader Alerts, you absolutely MUST sign up for our text message service.

For risk profiles of some of MOT?s recent trades, please see the charts below.

The ?Mad Options Trader service focuses primarily on the weekly US equity options expirations, with the goal of making profits at all times.

The trading will take place in the S&P 500 (SPX), major industry ETF?s like the Financials Select Sector (XLF), and large capitalized single names, such as Facebook (FB), JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM), and Apple (AAPL).

Matt is my old friend and fellow comrade in arms of Top Gun Options, one of the best performing trade mentoring outfits in the industry.

Matt?s performance works out to an eye-popping average of 7.92% a month, and annualizes out to an incredible 95.11% a year.

Matt, a native of New Jersey, joined the Navy straight out of college, and rose to become an F-18/A fighter pilot. He attended the famed Top Gun school in Coronado, California. During the second Iraq War, Matt flew 44 combat missions.

Matt left the service in 2006, and immediately entered the hedge fund industry. A rapid series of promotions eventually took him to Peak6 Investments, L.P., a prominent Chicago hedge fund.

There, he soaked up the most crucial elements of technical market timing, fundamental name selection, risk control, and options trade execution.

These are the multiple skills that have enabled Matt to post such a blockbuster performance.

Matt, known to his friends by his old pilot handle of ?Whiz?, is an incredibly valuable addition to the Mad Hedge Fund Trader team. I have appointed him Head of Options Trading.

I have known for some time that fortunes were being made in the weekly options expirations, where stories of tenfold returns are not unheard of. It is a strategy that is perfectly suited to these highly volatile, uncertain times, with most options positions expiring within four days.

Matt allows us to fill that gap in our product offerings.

The Mad Options Trader provides essential support for the active trader and will include:

1) Instant Trade Alerts texted at key technical levels. Alerts will be sent out on the opening and closing of every filled position.

2) Weekly Market Strategy Webinars held every Monday at 1:00 to 1:30 PM ET to give you a head?s up on the week ahead.

3) A weekly Live Trading Room held every Tuesday from 9:00 to 10:30 AM ET to give followers active real time trading experience.

4) Specialized Training Webinars on how to best execute Matt?s trades.

What I love about Matt is that he eats his own cooking.

Many of the Trade Alerts he recommends are executed in his own personal retirement account with real dollars.

From September 1, The Mad Options Trader will be available as a $1,500 per year upgrade to The Diary of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader or Global Trading Dispatch, the core research and trade mentoring service of the Mad Hedge Fund Trader.

Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
Publisher and CEO of The Mad Hedge Fund Trader

?I Only Hire the Best Talent

At almost every Global Strategy Luncheon I have hosted for the past decade, the same experience would replay itself.

Some kid would approach me with an algorithm driven trading program that was guaranteed to make money. It back tested perfectly and delivered spectacular returns.

Would I be willing to fund it for $1 million?

My answer was always the same: NO.

For a start, as a Math minor from UCLA, I never believed that the supplicants had the academic chops to accomplish such a feat. It all reeked of cherry picked data mining to me.

I know that big brokers like Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) deployed armies of Computer Science PhDs using $10 million mainframes attempting to accomplish the same thing.

Results were mixed at best.

Only the giant quant houses like Jim Simons? highly secretive Renaissance Technologies, LLC and DE Shaw have found the Holy Grail.

Finally, as a Marine combat pilot I can assure you that all machines eventually break. It is a certainty. This is what they drill into you at flight school. The only question is when.

When you?re betting your life on a machine, such a lesson leaves a deep imprint.

Just ask the shareholders of Knight Capital, who on August 1, 2012 saw their equity largely wiped out when a programming glitch enabled their computers to accidently lose $440 million in 30 minutes. A single line of errant code was the culprit.

However, I am starting to change my mind. At least this dog CAN learn new tricks.

The convincing factor has been the mysterious behavior of the major stock indexes over the past year, where traditional short-term market timing indicators have suddenly become useless.

Technical analysis has become a license to lose money, prompting adherents to buy every rally and sell each dip at great cost.

Just look at the market action of the past month, where you can hold a ruler over the charts and define a perfectly flat line. It is not a chart reflective of human interaction.

It?s as if all the traders were suddenly kidnapped and held hostage at an undisclosed location. I?ve never seen anything like it before.

Hedge funds are getting slaughtered, delivering their worst year in a 30-year history. As a result, a great washout in the industry is now underway. It may be the next industry to get totally disrupted.

As with all sea changes in market behavior, the reasons are legion.

A principal factor is the utter collapse of the cost of processing power. Super computers passed the processing power of the human brain in 2012.

It will improve a trillion fold by 2020, when such firepower will be available on a low-end laptop for only $2,000.

This means that entry-level technology budgets for these strategies will plunge from tens of millions to hundreds of dollars.

What happens when you get a several thousand fold drop in the cost of a technology? You get a lot more of it.

Enter social media and the sharing economy. All of a sudden, the tools needed to develop quantitative trading strategies are widely available, often for free.

Almost anyone can now access infinite amounts of data, again, for free. New big data programs make the analysis of this data easy.

Communities of programmers, mathematicians, and algorithmic traders are now sharing information in order to gain a competitive edge. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are joining the fray.

And while many hedge funds are still charging the traditional 2% and 20%, many quant managers don?t charge management fees at all. They?ll settle for a flat 20% of net profits, whatever those are.

The numbers are starting to impact the make up of the hedge fund community.

In 2009, some $407.7 million of $3 trillion in hedge fund assets was driven by quantitative strategies, according to Hedge Fund Research. Today, that figure has leapt to $878.7 billion, some 31.35% of the declining total.

At a time when the traditional hedge fund strategies are failing, some of the bolder firms are experimenting with the new technologies.

Steven Cohen?s Point 72 has committed up to $250 million in Quantopian?s start up crowdsourced hedge fund.

Numerai, a small San Francisco based hedge fund, is awarding prizes to ?the best trading programs submitted anonymously by data scientists.

Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin?s Citadel have hired advanced computing staff from IBM and Microsoft.

Other hedge funds are scouring Silicon Valley and the big universities for the talent to cobble together an in house effort.

Performance will ultimately determine which strategies will take us forward. So far the quants are winning.

Many algorithmic traders are showing decent profits in 2016. If conventional managers are up, they are lagging the 7% gain of the S&P 500.

And many are still down on the year in the wake of the meteoric six-month run in equities since February 9. Underweight managers have been chasing performance all year.

In the end, it is the investors who will determine the success or failure of quantitative algorithmic trading. Until now, it has remained a niche in which few individuals can participate.

It remains to be seen how much money the markets can absorb from the specialized, high technological approaches to the market, and whether the big pension funds can ever go near them.

A recurring flaw in many of these programs is the assumption of constant market liquidity which Long Term Capital Management proved to be a myth in 1998.

Still, who knows? Your next fund manager may be a Terminator.