The Wall Came Down

THERE IS NO TRACK RECORD IN THIS BOOK. A track record is somebody's word about a trader. This one asks to be checked instead: fifty-six structures at the back, every premium, greek and breakeven among them computed from a single option chain, printed in full in Appendix A. For twenty-five years a line ran across the American options market at twenty-five thousand dollars. Above it you could trade actively. Below it you could not. The rule that drew the line was written in 2001, after a boom that had already ended, and it outlived the market it was built for by more than two decades. On 4 June 2026 it was removed. FINRA Rule 4210(f)(8)(B), in force from 27 February 2001, is gone, and the pattern day trader designation and the four-trade counter went with it. Millions of accounts that had been shut out of active options trading can now take part. But access is not an edge. Most of the people arriving will be intelligent, analytical and genuinely good at forming views about companies. A large proportion of them will lose money while being right. This is not an argument for trading options. It is an account of what the record and the arithmetic show: what the rule was, who asked for it and what the evidence behind it actually said; what a payoff diagram leaves out, which is most of what decides the outcome; and what each of the fifty-six structures costs, earns and risks when every one is priced from the same chain on the same day. No track record. No backtests. No account statements. No screenshots of winning trades. No forecasts, and nothing for sale inside the covers. Where the author states a figure, he prints the chain it came from. Where a computation was wrong in an earlier draft, the correction appears in the text where the error was made, not quietly in the next printing. WHAT YOU CAN CHECK Every figure traces to one option chain, printed in Appendix A. The formulae are in Appendix C, stated plainly enough to use. Every regulatory claim is cited to FINRA filings and the Federal Register. Two corrections are printed in the text, at the point of the error. 423 pages. 32 chapters in five parts. Fifty-six structures, one page each, with a glossary and a full index. Foreword by Marty Kearney, former Senior Instructor at The Options Institute at Cboe, who spent thirty-six years as a floor trader, a partner in a brokerage firm and on the staff at the Institute. Dr. Clemen Chiang has taught options since 2003, to more than fifty thousand students, and is the founder of Spiking. Book One of The Disclosed Record.