The iron condor is one of the most popular option strategies available to traders. Unfortunately, it is also possibly the most dangerous.

See here’s the deal: when a new fresh faced option trader first hears of this trading strategy – he or she becomes so enamoured with it that they just can’t seem to help but jump right into trading them – risking way too much money – and without much thought of what they are going to do if the trade starts to go wrong.

And it seems that a good percentage of them – if not most of them – promptly wind up getting their groins kicked in, their heads ripped off, their eyes poked out, and getting hurt really, really bad.

Now wait -

Let me explain something here before you start to get the wrong impression.

I actually LIKE iron condors. I like them ALOT.

And yes – I really do think it’s a great and dependable way to trade.

And yes, I absolutely believe all those stories and claims you hear swirling around about iron condors generating ten percent plus monthly returns and providing trades that have the probability of winning somewhere in the range of eighty to ninety percent. In fact, I KNOW those stories are true because I see it happen all the time in my very own trading account.

Here is the problem: All those fresh, green and excited new option traders have no idea what they don’t know. This trading options for income thing is like an alien planet – with a whole new set of rules inside a brand new reality. And when the person who has introduced them to this new way of trading just tells them about the good but forgets to tell them about the bad – they wind up jumping in with way too much confidence, misunderstanding, and expectations that are completely wrong.

See, while it may be true that the iron condor and credit spread strategies can kick off yields of over ten percent monthly and that they favor the trader by offering high probabilities of winning (in some instances as high as 80 and 90 percent) – what isn’t being talked about is the risk to reward ratio of these trades – which can be as high as 10 to 1.

This means that in order to achieve those 80 to 90 percent probability trades – you need to risk ten dollars to make just one – or to be more realistic – you need to put at risk $10,000.00 for the chance to make just $1,000.00.

And as mammy used to say to us kids – ‘that ain’t nothin but a real awful bad egg’.

Just do the math. With a risk to reward like that, even with the great probabilities and wonderful monthly returns – before long a problem month could come along and completely wipe out your entire account!

However…

There is still hope…

Because – as I wrote previously – I REALLY DO like the iron condor strategy.

It’s one of my favorite trades – and it continually generates profits for me.

So clearly there must be a way to profitably trade this strategy without allowing that awful risk to reward issue to get in the way.

And there is.

It’s all in how you manage the trade.

That risk to reward problem quickly becomes a complete non issue as soon as you educate yourself on the proper way to initially set these trades up and how to correctly manage and adjust them.

You just need to arm yourself with a small amount of trading know-how. A few iron condor tricks that will allow you to quickly and easily adjust yourself out of sticky situations and smother any problem month threat that comes along, permitting you to experience the iron condor strategy for all that it’s ‘really’ cracked up to be.

To learn a much ‘better’ way to trade the Iron Condor spread for monthly income, visit this Iron Condor Adjustments site for simple step-by-step instructions on how to correctly place, manage, and ADJUST iron condor trades.