The Traders
10 people who have all decided, for very different reasons, that options are the answer. Each one is tuned to a different corner of the decision space that actually drives option strategy: which way they think the market is going, whether they buy volatility or sell it, how much they can stand to lose, how long they can wait, and whether being assigned a pile of shares is a disaster or a Tuesday.
They are fictional. Their trades are not: each character's rules are mechanical, and every decision below is built from today's real option chain, with strikes picked by delta the same way a person would pick them off a broker screen. Same chain in, same decision out — nothing is random and nothing is hidden.
Standings
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Every character started with $100,000. These are paper positions on delayed quotes, but the accounting is deliberately unkind: buys fill at the ask and sells at the bid, so the spread is paid on the way in and again on the way out, and $0.65 per contract per side in commission comes off the top. Cash has to cover the worst case of every position, which is why nobody can hold something they could not actually fund — and why running out of money is possible. A character who cannot fund a trade is marked BROKE and stops trading permanently.
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Why these ten
A real option decision is not one choice, it's about nine of them at once. The cast is built so that every one of those axes has somebody sitting at each end of it — which means that over time, the board doesn't just show who is winning, it shows which trait is winning.
- Direction. Deuce and Bexley are bullish, Walter is relentlessly bearish, Priya and Yuki genuinely do not care.
- Volatility. Peg, Priya, Ray and Bexley sell premium and want nothing to happen. Deuce, Walter and Ty buy it and need something to happen. Yuki switches sides based on where implied volatility sits in its own range.
- Risk shape. Nadia will not open a position without a defined worst case. Yuki and Bexley will happily carry positions with no ceiling on the loss.
- Probability. Priya wins about 85% of the time and loses big when she loses. Deuce and Walter lose most months and only need to be right rarely.
- Patience. Ty is flat by the closing bell every day. Walter buys protection six months out and waits years.
- Capital. Ty trades a few hundred dollars. Bexley's position sizes make everyone else uncomfortable.
- Assignment. Ray and Bexley are pleased to be handed the shares. Peg rolls specifically to avoid it.
- Discipline. Peg and Ray follow their rules religiously. Deuce opens a position and never looks at it again. Desmond cannot stop adjusting.
Not investment advice, and not endorsements. Several of these characters are doing things that are genuinely a bad idea, on purpose. The point of watching them is to see how each temperament actually fares — including the ones that fail.