About

Why I built this

After 25 years in the investment business, I’ve become convinced of two things — and tired of watching the industry ignore both.

First: most investment products sold to individuals fail on the one thing that matters most over decades — valuation. What you pay for a business matters. It always has. And yet the overwhelming majority of portfolios I’ve seen get built without a serious conversation about whether the underlying is a bargain, fairly priced, or dangerously expensive.

Second: one of the most respected strategies in modern finance — selling options for income — has been almost entirely divorced from the discipline that makes it actually work. Retail investors chase hot tips. Advisors sell products instead of advice. Options content teaches mechanics without ever asking what business you’re actually underwriting.

Value Options Letter is my attempt to bridge both gaps — to build what I wished existed when I started studying markets a quarter century ago.

Who I learn from

My investment philosophy is built on the writing and track records of investors I’ve studied for decades: Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Charlie Munger, Bill Nygren, Bill Miller, Bruce Berkowitz, Bill Ackman, Stanley Druckenmiller, and others.

What these investors have in common isn’t a secret formula. It’s discipline — about valuation, about temperament, about doing the work to understand a business before putting capital at risk. Decades of academic research, from Fama and French’s documentation of the value premium to Frazzini, Kabiller, and Pedersen’s reverse-engineering of Buffett’s alpha, have pointed to the same conclusion: buying quality at sensible prices, and holding it with discipline, has been one of the most reliable approaches over the long run.

Why so few advisors use options — and why that’s a problem

In 25 years in this industry, I’ve watched an entire strategy class — one used openly by Warren Buffett, tracked in CBOE indices since the late 1980s, and documented in peer-reviewed academic research — get ignored by the vast majority of financial advisors. The reasons aren’t good ones.

Many advisors simply don’t know how to use options. It wasn’t in their training. The firms that hired them didn’t teach it. Once you’ve built a practice on mutual funds and asset allocation, adding options mechanics feels risky — not because options are dangerous, but because the advisor isn’t comfortable.

Many large broker-dealers and advisory firms have compliance departments that treat options as a liability rather than an opportunity. It’s easier to say no than to evaluate each trade on its merits. So advisors either don’t offer options at all, or they do so in such restricted ways that the strategies lose their edge.

And then there’s the industry’s real business model: gathering assets, not managing them. Fee-based advisors are compensated on AUM. Complex, time-intensive strategies — like running thoughtful options-income positions — are economically unattractive for the advisor, even when they’d materially benefit the client. It’s simpler to sell the 60/40 portfolio, collect the management fee, and move on.

The result: the individual investors who would benefit most from options-income strategies almost never hear about them from their advisor. The gap isn’t regulatory — options are legal, widely documented, and used by some of the most respected investors of the modern era. The gap is institutional. Value Options Letter exists to bridge it.

Why options, and why now

Selling options for income isn’t exotic or new. Warren Buffett has publicly described doing it for decades:

• In 1993, he sold puts on Coca-Cola to collect premium while waiting to buy shares at a lower price.
• Before Berkshire’s 2009 acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, he sold puts on BNSF to accumulate the position at his price.
• In 2008, Berkshire sold $4.9 billion of equity index put options — disclosed openly in its annual reports.

The CBOE has tracked mechanical options-selling indices since the late 1980s. Academic research has repeatedly shown that the variance risk premium — the historical tendency for options buyers to overpay versus what actually happens — gives systematic sellers a structural tailwind.

But the options content most individual investors encounter is built around speculation: directional bets, earnings lottery tickets, get-rich-quick trades. It teaches mechanics without ever asking the question that matters most: what business are you actually underwriting?

The combination nobody teaches

Value Options Letter brings together two disciplines that almost never appear in the same place:

Every trade I write up begins with a business I would genuinely want to own at the strike price. Not “would I buy it if I had to.” Want. If the underlying fails the valuation test, the trade doesn’t happen — no matter how attractive the premium looks.

That discipline is the edge. The options math is table stakes.

What subscribers actually get

• 3-5 new trade ideas each week, each published with the full thesis, strikes, capital at risk, and why I consider it attractive.
• Exit analysis on every trade the letter publishes — what worked, what didn’t, what I learned.
• A full track record of VOL trade ideas — including losses, never cherry-picked.
• Research on the underlying companies, not just the options mechanics.

No hot tips. No daily churn. No promises of specific returns. Just research-first, value-first options income — the same discipline I’ve practiced across 25 years in this industry.

Who this is for

Value Options Letter is for investors who want to earn income from options without gambling. Who want the work — the research, the valuation analysis, the exit reasoning — shown, not hidden. Who understand that the edge in this business comes from discipline, not prediction.

If you’re looking for daily trade alerts, hot momentum picks, or promises of triple-digit annual returns, this isn’t the right fit.

If you’re looking for a research-first, value-first approach to options-income investing — run by someone who’s spent 25 years watching what doesn’t work in this industry — you’re in the right place.

Disclaimer: Value Options Letter is a subscription-based research publication. A subscription does not establish an advisory relationship or provide personalized investment advice. Value Options Letter is separate from T&T Capital Management LLC; subscribers to Value Options Letter are not clients of T&T Capital Management LLC. Options trading involves risk and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Subscribers are responsible for their own investment decisions. Statistics and research cited on this site reflect historical findings and do not constitute predictions of future returns for any subscriber or strategy. For personalized investment advice, consult a qualified investment professional.