Horace Taft

Instructor

The market has always held a fascination for Horace.  He first became interested in technical analysis in the late nineties when personal computers made cumbersome charting and analysis much simpler and accessible to retail traders.  However, his trading career did not begin until 2009 after the financial crisis. The crisis and our country's response to it clearly illustrated to him the central role our markets play in our society.

Having watched professional managers rely on diversification and long time horizons to weather the “Great Recession” and the concurrent market downturn he became convinced that there must be a better way to protect capital and profit from the market action of equities.  That is when he discovered the versatility and flexibility of the options market.  He strongly believes that with the right tools and understanding most individuals are the best stewards of their own money. OptionsANIMAL represented an opportunity to gain the knowledge and understanding necessary to successfully manage his and his family's investments without relying on paid managers.  He has been a full-time trader since graduating from OptionsANIMAL in 2012.

Initially, he traded bull puts and naked cash-secured puts to generate income.  While these strategies proved effective during the bull market that developed it was clear to him that he needed a deeper understanding of how to hedge trades and mitigate risk while still profiting from the strong trends in the market.  That is when he foundOptionsANIMAL.  He became a student in April of 2011 and has been active in the community as a graduate since 2012.

Before becoming a full-time trader Horace and his wife owned and operated a retail bookstore and coffee shop in Minnesota for fifteen years.  Prior to that, he worked in politics, and as a graduate student studied and taught classes at the University of Minnesota in the department of the history of science and technology.  Teaching is a source of great satisfaction and he is excited to be involved with OptionsANIMAL as an instructor.

Horace is most interested in the psychology of trading and understanding how individuals and institutions behave in the markets and how that behavior manifests itself in the price action of individual equities.  A deep skeptic of the efficient market theory he looks for patterns based on investor sentiment and the timeframes in which they operate to craft profitable trades.

His favorite trades are call and put diagonals that look to profit from shorter-term moves in the underlying stocks and ETFs.  Since the bulk of his assets are in individual stocks and ETFs, the collar trade is an essential part of his trading plan.

He currently resides in western Massachusetts on a small farm.  When not engaged with the markets he can usually be found fishing in the Deerfield River, weather permitting.