Avant Options

Listed to the Reviews

Avant did very well a few years ago but after some nasty losses, they pretty much stopped communicating and folded up. No emails were answered, no more trades. They just unplugged themselves from the service.

They no longer exist as a service, even though the website is still up. Stay away from this service. The low-rated reviews you see here reflect the truth.

Trust Score

1.0

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Auto trading Avant Options

From Jan 2013 to Aug of 2013 they took a 50k account down to 15k. For the last few months they did not post the actual in and out trades and when questioned said they were the same trades being rolled forward to future months. That is BS because they may have been rolling forward but they had to close out one months options as they opened new ones in the next month forward. I can not recommend their service to anyone.

Trust Score

1.0

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Terible

I subscribed to Avant Options earlier this year on the basis of good reviews on this site and StockGumshoe. Unfortunately the performance has been terrible and the losses have been substantial. They did not choose the right strategies and continued to try and predict the market direction. They also did not close out losing trades but chose to continue to roll them over further extending losses. The worst part is they have cancelled my subscription without any notification and when questioned about it they admitted that they were no longer operating due to the poor performance but their website seems to still be accepting new subscriptions. Save your money and choose another service.

Trust Score

1.0

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Hubris

I think Avant is like many other condor services. When vol is high, they all do reasonably well. Hard not to. But in these market conditions true alpha shines through. Avant has negative alpha.

- They have decimated the allocation I autotraded with them.

- They hardly communicate, but when they do its back patting

- I think because of their past losses, they are taking on riskier trades.

- They are indefinitely rolling their losing trades to postpone losses.

- On top of that - they trade SPY, IWM, and DIA which are commission intensive

Trust Score

1.9

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Big drawdowns and very risky

They said in the website that's they consistently achieve targeted annual returns of 20-40% while minimizing drawdowns and overall risk. This is not true. they currently have 4 positions credit spread that are in loss position and in deep money. I would say for unrealized lose. they lose 80% of Portfolio now.

They have a big loss in June/July/august cycle ( not loss yet in their opinion since they now roll all positions again to September ). I subscribe their service since the beginning of this year and they have had the big loss in March, May and now. The track record on their website is not updated with their rolled positions. You will see that they have less positions in April and May because They rolled all of their losing call spread positions out to June, then July, August and September.

I thought they learned and can improve their service. But seems they will never learn. I should have just canceled the service since March.

Trust Score

1.1

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Reckless Risk Management

I tested Avant Options performance for the first 5 months of 2013, autotraded via GAT/IB. I also autotrade a few other similar newsletters and while I can't comment on their performance outside of this period, the losses during the first half of 2013 far exceeded all of the others. I think their are two primary reasons for this:

1) they badly misread the market during what has been a vigorous bull run. Putting over 75% of their positions on bear call spreads caused inevitable losses. The drivers for the current bull run could be debated, but to ignore the effects of QE1 & 2 on market behaviour since 2009 right on the heels of the QE3 announcement has to take quite some justification.

2) Finding themselves the wrong side of the market they two times made (in my opionion) reckless gambles. The first time was in March when positions were rolled up to the next strike with less than $1 of intrinsic. It is to their credit that they subsequently posted a mea-culpa analysis and promised never to take this type of risk again. Nonetheless a month later as positions once again got dangerously close to being rolled they posted their intention to do exactly the same thing again, thankfully the market backed off a tad and prevented the need for a repeat of the same gamble.

However, in May they rolled all of their losing call spread positions out and DOWN. Once again a big gamble which counted on a sharp pull back in market prices to pay off. This was the point when I decided enough was enough and took over unwinding their positions myself.

Over the long haul they may deliver a good return for subscribers, and some may be comfortable with their casino-style approach to reading market direction and adjusting loss-making positions, however I found their approach to risk management to be anything but conservative and not in-line with my risk tolerance.

Trust Score

1.0

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Don’t sleep at night at all...

Not much to add to the previous testimonial regarding Avant options. Another big weakness of their service from my point of view is that they trade several indexes at the same time and in the same direction (in this case bearish for the March cycle). But those indexes are anyway highly correlated. If one trade goes wrong you can be nearly sure that the other ones will be losing trades as well. So why trading several indexes when one single trade on one of them would lead to the same result at the end? Why paying 4 times as much commission fees? Because it is probably more sexy to show a portfolio with several positions instead of only one... Furthermore Avant Options doesn’t give any rationale about why they enter their trades, which strikes they chose, why bearish or bullish, etc. Seems as if they would trust to chance or just make their decisions based on basic overbought/oversold market indicators, which as we know, do not work very well in trendy markets.

Trust Score

1.8

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Unprofessional

I would like to mention the management of the trades of Avant Option for the March options cycle to make people aware of how unprofessional this service is.

They opened around the 22nd of February a bunch of bear call spreads on several indexes (S&P, Dow Jones, Russel, etc.). They were accordingly trading against the bullish momentum of the markets. One or two days later the markets fell, bringing the open positions in a temporary winning area. Avant Options was quick in sending an email celebrating themselves about how excellent their timing was... The problem is that the markets rallied since then. Apart from a meagre bull put spread opened on the SPY, they kept all bearish positions until a couple of days ago where the first tremendous losses were finally cut.

Avant Options felt great about their management and wrote how well they felt in cutting the losses timely enough. As such they manage to “sleep soundly at night”. And that’s also the reason why their strategy is so wonderful... Well, the problem is that just after having closed the losing positions on the Dow Jones (through the DIA ETF), they immediately opened a new bear call spread (only one strike higher than the previous losing spread) in order, as they claimed, to recoup the loss of the previous trade. No need to say how amateurish this is. Even a beginner in trading would not make such a mistake. And what should happen happened indeed. This position went wrong as well and additional tremendous losses were realised again.

Don’t be lured by the figures shown on the website: there is no sound strategy behind the trades of Avant Options. They are fighting the trend, the losses can be tremendous when they are on the wrong side of the market and the winning trades seem to be more the result of luck than the result of a technical or fundamental analysis.

Trust Score

3.9

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Avant Options has a great trading system. They deliver.

I am a retired engineer and familiar with using probability for design. I have read many books on different trading and investing methods. I liked the iron condors and credit spreads and the probability used in trading with this method. I started using Avant Options a few months ago, and they save me the time and trouble of picking the trades. Plus they do not waste my time with useless e-mails and letters, or trying to sell you more services. They give you just what you need to know. I have not tried auto trading, but plan to look into it.

These trades are not riskless. If the market goes against you, the loss can be big. However, Avant Options is conservative, and makes geat recommendations. In reviewing the history of their trades, they have managed the risk very well. How many other newsletters give you the history of their trade recommendations? Most don't want you to know. It takes some work to understand the system, but it makes sense and works.

Trust Score

1.0

User’s Review Ratings

Overall

Keeps On Rocking

Keeps on rocking steady gains 2 years in a row for me. Better than 25% gains 2 consecutive years with minimal and well managed drawdowns. Music to my ears, and my pocket :-)

Trust Score

1.0

User’s Review Ratings

Overall