Schaeffer's Investment Research - Trading Approach & Award-Winning Methodology

Home Site Map Advertise with Us About Us My Account Shopping Cart Help Sign In

Schaeffer’s Investment Research Inc. offers real-time option trading services to investors, as well as a full array of print and multi-media educational offerings, including daily, weekly and monthly newsletters. The SchaeffersResearch.com Web site provides financial news and commentary, as it happens, throughout the market day, plus stock screeners, filters and many other option tools to give investors an edge.

Our monthly Option Advisor, the nation's leading options newsletter and the company's flagship publication, has been published since 1981. Every month, Bernie and his team of analysts provide subscribers with 10 new suggested option trades, with commentary accompanying each trade. Option Advisor also includes a monthly column by Bernie in which he comments on the news and discusses longer-term market trends.

What sets Schaeffer's apart from the crowd? It's Expectational Analysis®, our three-tiered methodology for analyzing stocks, stock sectors, or the market as a whole. It combines:

Fundamental analysis, which deals with factors such as earnings, dividends, price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, and projections of the strength of the economy.
Technical analysis, which focuses on historical price patterns, volume characteristics, trends, and quantitative analysis in order to predict future price movements.
And, finally, sentiment analysis, a clear-eyed, quantitative dissection and study of the beliefs and convictions of the market.

Our methodology is contrarian. One of the most important tenets of the Expectational Analysis® approach is that the power of a contrarian indicator is much greater when the underlying sentiment runs counter to the direction of the stock. For example, pessimism would be an expected reaction to a downtrending market and would therefore not be a valuable contrary indicator. On the other hand, skepticism in a rising market is a powerfully bullish combination, seen until optimism reaches extreme levels.

About Bernie Schaeffer

Bernie Schaeffer is widely recognized as an expert on equity and index options, investor sentiment, and market timing, and speaks frequently at industry gatherings.

Bernie's groundbreaking book, The Option Advisor: Wealth-Building Techniques Using Equity & Index Options, was published in October 1997 by John Wiley & Sons. He also contributed a chapter on sentiment analysis to three books from Bloomberg Press, New Thinking in Technical Analysis: Trading Models from the Masters (2000), Investing Under Fire, Winning Strategies from the Masters for Bulls, Bears, and the Bewildered (2003), and Breakthroughs in Technical Analysis: New Thinking from the World's Top Minds (2007).

Timer Digest, which has been monitoring Bernie since 1984, consistently ranks him among the top 10 out of more than 100 analysts for market timing. He is the recipient of the 2004 Traders' Library Hall of Fame Award for his numerous contributions to the field of trading. In 2003, Aaron Task of TheStreet.com selected him as the market "Guru of the Year." Bernie won the 2002 BusinessWeek Market Forecast Survey for most accurately forecasting year-end levels for the DJIA, NASDAQ Composite Index, and the S&P 500. In addition, he received the Best of the Best Award from the Market Technicians Association for his contributions to sentiment/psychological analysis.

Today, Bernie and his staff are frequent commentators on financial markets and their comments are often sought by national print and broadcast media outlets. Their innovative views and insights are frequently seen on CNBC, CNN, ABC World News Now, Fox News Channel, CBSMarketWatch.com, USA Today, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Stocks Futures & Options Magazine and The New York Times.

History

It all started in 1981, with two people at a kitchen table producing the first issue of a newsletter. The humble beginning has grown into an investment publications business with more than 60 employees; daily, weekly and monthly newsletters; an award-winning Web site, and more than 20 electronically delivered stock and options alert services. Schaeffer’s has developed into a force on Wall Street with tens of thousands of subscribers. Our Web site, SchaeffersResearch.com, has twice been recognized by Forbes.com as the “Best of the Web” among all options Web sites.

We have a wide array of products, ranging from educational courses for beginners to very aggressive alert services for advanced traders. Just a few examples include:

10 Days to Successful Options Trading

No matter what kind of investor you are, option trading offers you tools to enhance and protect your portfolio. Our popular home study course will show you how to leverage relatively small amounts of capital into big profits -- in just 10 days. We have structured this program so it is fun and easy to understand. It teaches you option basics, principles and strategies in a concise, easy to follow and graduated format. In other words, key concepts and terms are strategically repeated throughout the course to enhance your learning; each chapter builds on and reinforces what you learned in the previous chapter. Every day, you'll be quizzed on what you've learned and you'll review your own paper trades. You'll also learn about all-important money management principles, technical analysis of equity performance, and our own Expectational Analysis® methodology. Includes CD, DVD, and other extras.

Wealthbuilder Alert Service

Wealthbuilder is a conservative, high-win service for investors with a lower risk tolerance. This service, which employs credit spreads and iron condors to put money in investors' pockets immediately, aims for gains of 15-20% per trade, and has resulted in a 79% win rate since its inception in 1993. Here is how it works: A credit spread consists of the simultaneous purchase and sale of puts (or calls) that expire at the same time but have different strike prices. Because the strike price of the sold option is closer to the underlying stock's price, it will carry a higher premium than the purchased option, resulting in a net credit in the trader's account. The ultimate goal of a credit-spread strategy is to retain this net credit by having both options in the spread expire worthless. We look for out-of-the-money options so that the investor can profit from a wide range of outcomes, including a modest move in the wrong direction. We also like to use front-month options; with their limited life spans, front-month options build in less time for the underlying equity to move substantially against the direction of the spread. Finally, we like to use index or exchange-traded fund (ETF) options, because they are less volatile than equity options.

Players Series

The Players Series is one of our most aggressive strategies and is intended for experienced traders with a high risk tolerance. Employing short-term out-of-the-money options, each trade aims for profits of 150% to 200% or higher. As with all of our alert services, you will have access to an online trading handbook. In the case of the Players Series, traders receive an average of two to four real-time recommendations a month. (We generally average between two and four open positions at one time.) In each trade, we follow up the same day with a commentary explaining our recommendation. In each recommendation, we will also provide you with a “maximum entry price.” We strongly advise against paying more than the maximum entry price. You will also receive real-time instructions on when to exit a trade. Players Series' subscribers typically hold trades for brief, 5- to 15-day periods, reducing risk and exposure to market swings

Click here for a complete listing on our Products and Services page.

Partner Center

options trading course