Contributors

Mike Rykes
Net Picks

Mike started trading back in 2002 as a finance major in college. It was quickly apparent during one of his first business classes that there was great wealth to be made in the stock market. Not one to be patient and wait for his degree to start making money, Mike discovered the great leverage that can be used in the options markets. This allowed him to start trading options with a very small account size while still in college.

Mike found success early in his trading career and decided to take the leap into full time trading soon after. Along the way, he had to learn many lessons the hard way like so many retail traders can relate to. It wasn’t until a visit to the floor of the CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) that he realized he had to put a system in place that he could stay disciplined to.

Mike discovered the NetPicks trading systems back in 2006 and quickly became a customer. This was the missing piece to the puzzle. This has allowed him to trade full time for a living ever since. After learning the systems inside and out over the span of the next 2 years, Mike joined the NetPicks team as a trading coach in 2008. He quickly became the resident options expert and has been Lead Options Instructor ever since. While he has dabbled in other markets over the years, trading options has become his go to market. Mike has worked with thousands of traders since 2008 and enjoys the opportunity to help others reach their trading goals.

Don Kaufman
TheoTrade

Don Kaufman is one of the industry’s leading financial strategists and educational authorities. With 18 years of financial industry experience, Mr. Kaufman oversees TheoTrade’s firm-wide strategy and deployment initiatives, while designing and executing upon innovative content in the financial education space.

Prior to TheoTrade, Mr. Kaufman spent six years at TD Ameritrade® as Director of the Trader Group. At TD Ameritrade Mr. Kaufman handled thinkorswim® content and client education which included the design, build, and execution of what has become the industry standard in financial education. He started his career at thinkorswim® in 2000 (acquired by TD Ameritrade® in 2009), where he served as chief derivatives instructor, helping the firm progress into the industry leader in retail options trading and investor education services.

Specialties: Equities, Options, Futures, Currencies, Risk Management, Financial Modeling, Technical Analysis, Volatility and Derivative Pricing, Market Making.

Doc Severson
TheoTrade

Doc Severson has been actively trading the U.S. stock, futures, and options markets since the mid-90s and his specialty is trading the U.S. equity options market. With a background in engineering, Doc is able to break down complex market ideas into an easily digestible format.

For the past ten years he has provided daily insights and market analysis via market newsletters, as well as helping students learn the complexities and edges of the options markets through live training and courses. Doc can be found at TheoTrade.com, daily in TheoChat® and twice per week in TheoNight® providing market insights and trade ideas.

Peter Schultz
Cashflow Heaven Publishing

Peter has been showing self-directed investors how to trade successfully since 1996, and is a nationally known speaker on options trading, the author of Passage to Freedom, The Options Success Trading Package, The Winning Secret Trading Package, The Explosive Profits Package and The Greatest Options Strategies on Earth. He has also written several important short reports on innovative options techniques, and is a popular guest on radio and television talk shows pertaining to trading and the financial markets.

Fascinated by the idea of asset-produced monthly income, Peter founded Cashflow Heaven Publishing in 1999 to help his subscribers obtain a better lifestyle through trading and investing strategies designed to produce exceptional monthly returns.

Peter graduated in 1982 from Southern Oregon University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business with marketing and finance concentrations. He is happily married with three children and makes his home in Ashland, Oregon...“on the eastern shores of Bear Creek somewhere north of Siskiyou Pass.

Larry Gaines
Power Cycle Trading

Larry Gaines has become one of the leading coaches for successful traders and investors. He continues to develop and host, every month, new trading educational programs to help traders and investors generate greater income from their investment capital with less risk exposure. He founded PowerCycleTrading.com and the Power Cycle Virtual Trading Room following over 30 years of professional trading experience in the commodity and equity markets. 

During his tenure as head of an international trading company that often traded a billion dollars’ worth of commodities in a single day, he learned first-hand the necessary elements of a successful trading system and the use of options.

Using this in-depth knowledge and experience, Larry developed the Power Cycle Trading™ Model to allow for greater profits with a more disciplined, systematic degree of trading success.

Geoffrey A. Smith
Diversified Trading Institute

Geoffrey Smith is DTI’s Chief Instructor. He teaches Level 1, 2, and 3 Core Curriculum Classes, regular educator and instructor on the 24-hour Educational TradeRoom, GPS Coaching, and one of Tom Busby’s first students.

An active trader and investor for 25+ years, Geof focuses in futures, equities and option trading including trading commodity option futures. Geof took an instrumental role in developing the DTI Method. The Platinum Experience core level classes took first place in SFO Magazine and Trader Planet’s STAR awards in the best trading courses category. Before coming to DTI, Geof was a pipeline engineer working in Oklahoma and Texas.

Chris Verhaegh
TradeWins

Chris Verhaegh’s father, who immigrated to the USA from the Netherlands as a young man, needed to help support his 9 siblings. So he never went to high school. Wanting better for their son, Chris’s parents were understandably grateful when his genius for math earned him a scholarship to a prestigious prep school in LA, (at age 14 Chris wrote and sold a logic puzzle to Dell Crosswords).

And that’s where it all began…

Chris’s 11th grade guidance counselor got him a job as mail clerk for an investment firm. Soon, Chris was writing the newsletters he previously addressed and mailed. And a few years later he became head of the precious metals division during the great ‘Gold Rush’.

In 1983, after the gold-bubble burst, Chris went to work for a private mint where he honed his skills as a precious metals trader, using options to hedge major holdings.

In search of a simpler lifestyle, Chris moved his wife and young daughter to Boise, Idaho (3 sons were subsequently born there). And he settled into trading for a living… plus writing, speaking, and teaching.

• Wrote more than 100 weekly columns for OptionInvestor.com.
• Conducted seminars and workshops for Investools and has been a frequent speaker at Investor Conferences and Money Shows
• On Business Advisory Board at Northwest Nazarene University
• Consultant for a European Investment Bank where he taught technical analysis to their fund managers, advised their proprietary trade desk, and helped trade over $2Billion.

Then, a collision of motivation and opportunity ushered in an exciting and extremely gratifying new chapter in Chris Verhaegh’s illustrious career…

Motivation: Homeschool advocate and promoter Rhea Perry asked Chris to design a trading course that would allow parents with very little capital to earn a reliable income while staying home with their children.

Opportunity: The CBOE introduced Weekly Options, which suddenly made it possible to turn $100-bills into $1,000 paydays… or $500 into a $5,000 payday… 52 weeks of the year.

So Chris designed the trading course Perry requested. And it did, in fact, give stay-at-home moms and dads a chance to live the lifestyle of their dreams. So naturally, they told their friends and family. And by word-of-mouth over $1million in courses were quickly sold.

The immediate success of so many beginning traders created quite a stir in the financial community… which led to additional courses and subscription products.

Yet, at the heart of it all, you’ll find just one thing …The PULSE System for identifying the greatest profit opportunities with the lowest possible risk.

Andrew Keene
Alpha Shark Trading

Prior to founding KeeneOnTheMarket.com in 2011, Andrew Keene worked as a proprietary trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Keene graduated from Botta Capital’s clerk-to-trade program to become known as one of fasted traders to ‘make a market.’ As a market maker he traded options in over 125 stocks, including Apple, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, and Yahoo. Keene left Botta Capital to co-found KATL Group, where he was the largest, independent on-the-floor Apple trader in the world.