Last week was probably the most intense in 2-Day Trader history. When the clock ticked down on our two active trades (both puts), we were forced out of one at a near-total loss . . . but the other became bigger than the two previous champions put together.

And as I suggested last week, the market math can’t be argued with. You can lose your entire stake in any given trade and that hurts. But even in that worst-case scenario, the drag on your long-term results will never be greater than 100%.

The rewards for a blockbuster win, on the other hand, obviously stack well above 100%. Play the right angle under the right conditions and you can not just double but triple and even quadruple you starting stake. We’ve proved it.

That big win on one set of puts was one for the ages, big enough to wipe out up to three near-total losses. That’s great. We’ve hit three of those big pain points in the last few months, so the triumph literally snatches us out of the jaws of deep frustration.

But that’s all part of life in the options market. Let a good trade ride a minute too late like the other puts and you’re on the slippery slope down to expiration . . . unless you have the extreme conviction that the market will turn in your favor before the final bell.

Volatility is part of the game here. Over the years, sad to say, about 1 in 10 have been what I’d consider major setbacks. My team has worked extremely hard to keep those big losses limited because they wanted to protect your feelings.

They didn’t think you were up for it. And so we played a ground game, taking small risks in order to capture small returns. It was OK . . . but you can’t shut out the strikeouts all the time, and when you’re only tiptoeing into the scoring zone, it’s practically impossible to fill your pockets enough to cushion the blow, much less rebuild afterward.

I heard a lot of complaints that we were holding back. After all, returns are always correlated with risk. You can’t aim for the stars if you’re terrified of stubbing your toe.

So here we are, aiming a little higher and playing a little harder. There will be crying along the way. There was always crying. But now we’re opening ourselves up to more cheering to balance the inevitable tears.

Here’s what that means in hard numbers. No spin, no feel-good coaching. Over the past 3 months, we’ve taken on 13 trades . . . a nice rhythm of roughly 1 a week. Only 3 losers, but they were all big ones, near-total blowouts.

Maybe 6-7 decent little wins like what we’re used to. They’re table stakes for us, the steady beat that keeps our accounts inching forward week by week. They’re the grind.

And along the way, we scored 2-3 wins big enough that it takes a catastrophic loss to erase their impact on our long-term record. Fine. They cancel a big loss or two . . . or rather, a big loss or two cancels all of them, leaving the little wins to keep us moving forward.

But then there’s that blockbuster. If we could score one of these triple-digit home runs every 3-4 months, I think we’ll like the results a lot. Thanks to that single trade, our average return in the past 90 days soars by about 21 percentage points.

As it is, we’re looking at an average net gain of 15% per trade in the trailing quarter. Enormous. YTD we’re still only up a little less than 10% per position . . . still extraordinary when you spread that love across 37 trades so far.

I’m not even going to calculate the annualized return rate or do any compounding because those numbers will look ridiculous. All I’ll say there is that it’s taken the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ eight solid months to do the work that we’ve achieved in 2 trades that have typically only needed 4-5 days to play out.

Of course you need a way to avoid busting after one of those big losses. You need dry powder to get back in the game and start making money again. I’ve counseled my 2-Day Traders on how to do this. Doing the math on the last 90 days, I see that this method would have turned a starting $10000 into $18822 . . . even counting the three big losses.

Go back YTD and you’ll find hot periods and cold ones, but this methodology would have stayed liquid throughout and generated a substantial boost to the reserve. No “compounding,” no doubling down. Just betting half the initial stake, over and over, rain and shine.

That’s how options trading works. You rely on your long-term edge to keep the cash working, but you also stay liquid to provide a buffer against a catastrophic loss.

Even if you came in on the first of our recent strikeout trades and got crushed your very first day here, the math shows that you should be back and ahead of the game now. If not, let me know. We succeed together.

I see endless traders who mock the notion of a “batting average” or win rate because they know that it isn’t so much about the consistency as the outcomes. If you score a base hit 80% of the time, it’s no good if those wins aren’t at least 1/4 as big as the losses. You can actually trade yourself into oblivion trying to shut out big wins and big losses.

After all, the wins can go a lot bigger than the losses. That’s the math we all want to experience. But my 2-Day Traders aren’t just dreaming about it. They’re living it!