Leav Graves is the founder and CEO of Option Samurai and a licensed investment professional with over 19 years of trading experience, including working professionally through the 2008 financial crisis. His passion for finance began in third grade, and he's been immersed in the markets ever since, turning a lifelong curiosity into a full-time career. Before founding Option Samurai, Leav worked as an options trader and portfolio manager, specializing in both fixed income and equity strategies.
He brings deep expertise in options trading, risk-defined strategies, and portfolio construction, with a strong focus on volatility, automation, and decision-making frameworks. Over the years, he has developed proprietary trading tools, including a dividend capture engine, an options-enhanced portfolio tracker, and an AI-based trade assistant. Leav’s insights have been featured in Benzinga, The Street, Yahoo Finance, and Finance Magnates, and he was named runner-up in the Benzinga Fintech Awards. His mission with Option Samurai is to equip retail investors with institutional-grade tools to help them make smarter, more confident trades.
Education
- Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Tel Aviv University
- Portfolio manager license from the Israel Securities Authority
References
- Interview on Benzinga (again)Â
- Contribute to US News.
- Interview on Fox Business.
- Author at the Option Samurai blogÂ
- Mentioned on Business Insider
- Featured on Finance Magnet
- Interview on Yahoo Finance
Experience
- Started actively trading ~2005 and have been actively trading since. Increased his expertise and moved into the professional space, only to return to the retail space with Option Samurai.Â
- Founder and CEO of Option Samurai, a platform designed to help retail investors make better options trades.
- Former Chief Analyst and Portfolio Manager at Dividend Investments, where he managed fixed-income portfolios for clients, focusing on cash-flow optimization and tax efficiency
- Advocate for democratizing options education and bridging the knowledge gap between retail and institutional traders.
- Options trading expert with deep experience building and executing strategies based on technical analysis, volatility patterns, quantitative models, fundamental metrics, and options open interest data.
- Such as cash-secured put, covered calls, dividend capture, collars, etc.
- Built quantitative trading systems for trading stocks, bonds, and options.
- Wrote hundreds of educational articles about options in the Option Samurai blog and emails.
- Developed a proprietary dividend-capture model combining options overlays and ex-date logic.
- Experienced in building trading algorithms that use call and put options and advanced strategies using Python and Excel-based tools.
- Built Go/No-Go models for fundamental analysis using financial reports, focused on Israeli and U.S. equities.
- Designed and tested volatility-based reversion strategies and earnings plays for short-duration options to capitalize on volatility crush, time decay, movement, etc., using iron condors, vertical spreads, and other options strategies.

Research, Analyse and Trade
Option Samurai is designed to help you find trade ideas quickly. After using our predefined scanners to find ideas quickly, we display all the trades in a table so you can compare the trades...
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New Feature: Expand results
Every time you scan on Option Samurai we scan through 10 data sources and more than 1 million options to find the best trades for you. After we find the relevant results, we group them per symbol...
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Use Option Samurai for FREE with Tradier
** Update: Please note that this is an old integration. Tradier changed the promotion, and unfortunately, there are no special offers available at this time.
Trade with TradierOption Samurai has...
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Option Samurai is participating in Citi bank's accelerator program
We are very happy to announce that Option Samurai was accepted to Citi accelerator program in TLV. During the 4 month program we will work with Citi's experts to continue to innovate and...
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Option Samurai Webinar replay
During June, together with our eSignal partners, we held a webinar on edges that individual traders have when trading options. We got a lot of positive feedback on this webinar. We believe that the...

Dividend Capture Watchlist for 3-8-2015
Over the last two weeks, the markets continued to move sideways and they are now at the high levels of the last year (and around all time high). The IV is low and the sentiment is bullish. Over the...
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Causes for stock price crash
A sudden crash in stock prices is very painful for investors and traders, and since we trade with options - Unexpected crush could be amplified and cause a lost of 100% of the money allocated to...
$EBAY and $PYPL Infographics
We've prepared an infographic following the recent eBay and PayPal Spin-off:
eBay and PayPal Infographic
Public Trade Log
If you follow us on Stocktwits and Twitter, you know that we tend to share market commentary and live trades on the feed. We didn't used to do it regularly, but since we got good feedback on the...
New Feature: Probability/Delta Scanner
We added a new scanner - A delta scanner. This scan allows you to limit the results according to delta - The change of the option contract when the underlying changes $1. So for example: If a stock...
Try our option scanner FREE for 14 days with no obligation
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