Matt Gardiner

Matt is a highly experienced options trader of 17 years, having been a private client broker and an inter-dealer broker in the city of London as well as working internationally in Australia during the commodities boom. His specialty is a sophisticated use of options to create portfolios or “books” of options using multiple time frames, strikes and varying quantities.

Paragon Options Volatility Trade

Paragon Options is a service that focuses exclusively on futures and ETF options. By doing so we are taking advantage of superior premiums compared to stock options and asset diversification offered by futures. Paragon Options is a directional options service that focuses on Sectors - Indexes, Metals, Energies, Bonds, and Commodities. CLICK HERE to learn...

Paragon Options – Nobody Ever Went Broke Taking a Profit

In today’s post we are looking at something slightly different in ParagonOptions. In the past month or so we have been broadening the range of products we trade to include ETF’s instead of just purely futures options. As well as obviously enabling us to trade a wider basket of products, it also allows us to...

Options Education – A Ratio Spread on the S&P500

Paragon Options is our futures option service which is intended to manage the risk of trading futures with various options strategies. This is an education article that we hope will expand your understanding of options as well as provide you with a trading idea for this week. This weeks blog post is looking at a...

Using a Calendar Spread to exploit High Volatility in the S&P500

This is a blog post for Paragon options showing one of our current live trades using the S&P500. This strategy is a calendar put spread using a long 2700 ES Futures put out in June and selling weekly options against it. The S&P 500 weekly options currently have a very high implied volatility and so...

33% Return in under 24 hours

On Paragon Options we placed a trade in the S&P 500 via ES futures options on the 31st March 2020 and closed out only 1 day later on the 1st April 2020. This was a low risk spread that was set up for a credit and that made over $10,000 in less than 24 hours....

Trading the S&P – Using Puts to Hedge the Upside

In the current paragon options portfolio, year to date we are up 35% and we currently have a December risk reversal in the S&P 500. This position was set up a couple of months ago looking for the S&P to move lower into Christmas. The strikes that were used were long puts at 2800 and...

Managing a Black Swan Event

In the last week we’ve closed out an oil straddle in paragon options while we were involved in the black swan event in Crude Oil. Most training services you’ll find on the Internet only show you large winning trades, however today I thought we would do things a little differently and show you a trade...

Trading Crude Oil Using a Custom Futures Options Position

In our last free commodity trading webinar we looked at a geared risk reversal with short calls in oil. This blog post will go through this trading strategy in detail. With the recent moves in crude oil we are looking to put on an upside trading strategy that would allow us to capture a good...