Leon Moyer

How Leon got started

Leon made his first trade in 2013. He bought penny stocks, convinced they were an easy way to get rich, and lost all of it. It was a small amount, but it left him with a skewed early view of investing and a lasting interest in markets. For most of his career after that, his investing was a workplace 401(k) and little else.

In 2018 he started putting small amounts to work. Late that year he opened a Robinhood account and picked individual stocks, including Microsoft and Kohl's, mostly from his own research and what he read online. He's candid that he was new and partly lucky. One lesson from that stretch: in March 2020 he bought a small biotech stock, sold it, and then watched it run far higher without him.

When the market crashed in the spring of 2020, he added money, because crashes have historically recovered. That one decision did most of the work for his returns. He sold the stock portfolio in October 2021, modestly profitable after about three years, and he acknowledges he probably didn't beat simply holding an index fund.

What markets taught him

A friend got him into crypto in early 2018. One small speculative buy, made after watching a video, paid off far beyond anything he expected, mostly because he wasn't watching it and never sold. He calls that luck, not a strategy anyone should copy. Without it, his crypto results would have been negative.

He also held about half his crypto on Celsius when the lender went bankrupt and froze accounts. He got part of it back through the bankruptcy payouts and kept the lesson: not your wallet, not your crypto.

Another friend's suggestion led him to forex, his first real day trading. It was profitable for a while, then turned into a net loss, and he stopped. What frustrated him most was price hitting his stop loss and then moving the way he'd predicted. Staring at a screen all day made the trading emotional, too.

Why options

Options solved that stop-loss problem for him. When you buy a call or a put, the most you can lose is the premium you paid, so a temporary move against the position before expiration can't stop it out. He accepts the tradeoffs that come with that, like time decay (theta).

How he trades and reviews

Leon treats the premium as his stop loss and decides his maximum loss before he enters a trade. He prefers options at least a week or two from expiration over same-day (0DTE) contracts, because theta erodes short-dated options quickly. With strict rules, he'll average down once or twice, but only if the original reason for the trade still holds. He knows plenty of traders disagree with that one.

His hardest lesson is that staring at charts is bad for you. Trading is emotional, so he sets alerts or take-profit orders and steps away instead of watching every tick. Deciding the maximum loss at entry takes away the urge to panic.

He journals every trade in OptionsPro. In his words, without journaling you're basically gambling, and that's part of why the team built it.

This reflects Leon's own experience and is not investment advice.

Building OptionsPro

Leon is the product lead at OptionsPro. His team also runs OptionsTrading.org and its weekly options newsletter. They found that many trading journals treated options as an afterthought alongside stocks, futures or crypto.

The team built OptionsPro to make options journaling simpler: connect a brokerage, organize multi-leg trades, and review performance by strategy.

Reviewing the Academy

At OptionsPro Academy, Leon is an expert reviewer. He reviews the lessons before publication; the Academy publishes them. Published lessons identify their reviewer and record their last-reviewed date, so readers can see who checked the material.