I didn’t expect to win the award.

I was really looking for feedback from other financial professionals regarding my trading ideas. But a group of market experts critically reviewed my work and determined that the strategy I present my readers each week is an example of one of the best ideas in technical analysis.

My research paper is the foundation of my current streak of 86-for-86 winning closed trades.

Recently, I had the honor of attending the 2015 Market Technicians Association’s Gala Awards Dinner in New York City. There I was presented with the Charles H. Dow Award, which is an award that highlights outstanding research in technical analysis.

And today I wanted to give you a glimpse of my award winning research.

#-ad_banner-#I spend a great deal of time studying and building on the works of successful investors. One of the most influential on my investing career has been Larry Williams, a well-known trader and author of 2003 book, “The Right Stock at the Right Time.” But it was actually an article he wrote in 2007 that has been one of the keys to my success.

Many traders follow the Volatility S&P 500 Index (VIX) — a measure of stock market volatility — because they expect it to help them spot changes in the direction of price trends. VIX is helpful in finding turning points in the S&P 500 index because futures on that index are used to calculate VIX. In general, traders look for high VIX levels as a sign of a market bottom and low levels as a sign of a potential top.

But while VIX provides information about the broader market, it doesn’t say much about specific stocks in the market.

That all changed in 2007, when Williams published an article in Active Trader called “The VIX Fix.” This article detailed an indicator that mirrored the VIX but could be calculated for any stock, ETF or security that’s traded. It was presented as a way to obtain the benefits of the VIX for individual securities.

I immediately realized that this idea was incredibly valuable and began researching it in detail. I eventually had two important insights into this indicator.

The first was that, while the indicator was appealing, it didn’t give timing signals. Like the VIX, peaks and troughs in the indicator were visible only in hindsight.

Second, Williams’ new metric was a measure of volatility. When the indicator was high, volatility was high, which is the ideal time to sell options. Unfortunately, this is also among the riskiest times to sell options because we have no way of knowing when volatility has peaked. With the right tweaks, I thought, we should be able to apply Williams’ VIX Fix to options selling.

To solve these problems, I added a moving average (MA) to the indicator. MAs are widely used in technical analysis to generate trading signals and are commonly applied to prices and to indicators. Popular indicators like stochastics and moving average convergence/divergence (MACD) are based on MA crossovers, so I knew this was theoretically sound. With extensive testing, I quickly found that it was a profitable insight.

By adding an MA to the VIX Fix, the market action would tell me when volatility had reached a short-term peak, allowing me to balance the potential risks and rewards of options selling.

With these insights, I created my own metric: the Income Trader Volatility (ITV) indicator.

I tested my new metric on each of the individual stocks in multiple indices. While the results varied some, they all had an average annual return of more than 10%, twice the average annual return of a buy-and-hold strategy.

The tests show that the ITV indicator can provide market-beating results with less risk than the overall market. This has translated into a perfect track record, including annualized gains of 65.8%, 125.6% even 212.2% to readers of my premium advisory, Income Trader, a newsletter dedicated to options selling.

Every week, I use my award-winning research to find potential winning trades to send my readers. Below are three stocks the ITV indicator identified as “buys.” By selling puts on these stocks instead of outright buying them, we can generate significant amounts of income and still have the opportunity to buy shares at a lower price.

In fact, I’ve asked my publisher to allow me to share three actionable trades with StreetAuthority readers in today’s issue. I’ve included the details below.

If you already know about options, specifically put selling, then these are three trades you could make today. Of course, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to continue our perfect track record, but I like our chances.

If you’d like more information on how to sell puts to generate income, then I urge you to check out my 8-minute training video that I put together. If you’re familiar with options and want my award-winning research and best trading ideas sent to your inbox every week, simply follow this link to sign up.