Office Hours Recap — Tom Sosnoff's 11 Favorite Strategies
We Went Through Tom Sosnoff's 11 Favorite Trades. We'd Change Four of Them.
Thursday, August 13, 2026 · Full replay below
We said we’d go through all eleven of Tom Sosnoff’s career strategies and be honest about which ones we run. That turned out to be a more interesting hour than expected, because we ended up disagreeing with him on four of them — and on one, the disagreement is the difference between a trade that works and one that doesn’t.
Tom has forty-four years and a track record most of us won’t get near. Disagreeing with him isn’t the point. Understanding why you’d size or strike something differently is.
All Eleven, and Where We Land on Each
Tom groups them three ways: ways to get long, ways to get short, and ways to sell volatility. Here is the full list with his parameters and our verdict.
Getting long
1. Short puts — 35–50 DTE, 16–22 delta, over 80% probability of profit. His default trade. → We run it, at a different delta. 22–32 rather than 16–22. “I don’t think you get paid enough for the sixteen delta option.” [00:16]
2. Jade lizard — short put plus a short call spread, ~40 DTE, credit must exceed the call-spread width to remove upside risk. → We run it, and Tony Battista invented it. We also take profits earlier than most — 25–35%, not 50%. [00:20]
3. Covered calls — stock plus a short call as one trade, 40–60 DTE, 25–30 delta, low basis and high implied volatility. → We run it. We closed a full GLD wheel this week — sold the put, took assignment, sold the call, closed both. [00:25]
4. Short put spreads — defined risk, collect 30–35% of the width. → We run it, and it’s what we’d point a smaller account toward instead of a naked put. [00:30]
5. Put ratio spreads — buy a put outside the expected move, sell twice as many further out, structured for a credit. → We run it, and we prefer it to his broken wing. More on that below. [00:34]
Getting short
6. Short call spreads — sold just inside the expected move, 30–50 DTE, because call skew makes them rich. → We’ll do it, without enthusiasm. “I don’t mind it, I don’t love it.” The useful tip: if it moves hard against you the next day, close it and sell it again. [00:44]
7. Broken wing butterfly — on the call side, about a month out, always for a net credit. → We’d flip it. Put side, not call side. On the call side it carries about three short deltas for the risk. Drop the long wing and run a one-by-two ratio instead — twelve deltas rather than three. [00:45]
8. Unbalanced iron condor — call spread wider than the put spread, for a directional lean. → Not at his widths. Thirty or forty wide against ten or twenty, maybe. “But ten dollars by five dollars? Can’t do it.” [00:52]
Selling volatility
9. Iron condor — defined-risk strangle, 30–40% of the width in credit, needs a rangebound market. → Neither of us has ever seen him trade one. “I’ve never seen him do an iron condor.” “Me either.” [00:40]
10. Short strangles — 16–20 delta, 45 DTE, wants a high implied volatility rank. One of his two biggest lifetime money-makers. → We agree with the trade and have none on. Volatility is too low to pay for the call side, so we’re in jade lizards instead. The management rule if you do run them: at fifteen deltas, cut your delta in half. [00:56]
11. Price reversion to the mean — trading volatility’s tendency to contract faster than it expands, or pairs trading correlated products. His other big money-maker. → We agree, with a warning. “You have to love it small. You must trade them small. They move way too big.” [01:01]
The scorecard: we run seven of the eleven more or less as he describes them, we’d change the strike or structure on three, and there’s one — the iron condor — that neither of us has ever actually seen him do.
The Four We’d Do Differently…
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