option education

By Lawrence G. McMillan

The CBOE recently listed a Condor Index (symbol $CNDR).  It is a benchmark index designed to track the performance of a hypothetical option trading strategy that sells a rolling condor spread.  The index uses $SPX options, which settle for cash on a monthly basis (“a.m.” settlement).   The hypothetical spread is rolled monthly.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 18, No. 04 on March 5, 2009.

We have been using the hedged strategy between volatility and the broad market for over a year now, and the results have been good. But there’s more to this strategy than meets the eye. So, perhaps it isn’t useful only when $VIX futures are sporting a big premium or discount. It might make sense in a broader array of situations.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 12, No. 12 on June 25, 2003.

In literally every issue of this publication, we discuss the levels of implied volatilities of various groups of options – stock options, index options, or futures options, for example. Of particular interest, in general, is how stock options are behaving, for they are the backbone of our volatility trading strategies. For example, if stock options are generally cheap, then we want to buy volatility. If they’re expensive, then we look for other strategies that take advantage of their expensiveness. Over all the years, we have not created a measurable index to treat the general level of stock option implied volatility, and that is an oversight that we intend to correct with this issue.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 21, No. 20 on October 26, 2012.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 19, No. 19 on October 14, 2010.

Each year about this time, we review and recommend a futures spread that has been quite profitable over the years: buying Feb Gasoline futures and selling Feb Heating Oil futures. We call this an intermarket spread since it involves a long position in one market and a short position in a different, but related, market.

This spread has generally been quite reliable in the past, but it can only be implemented in one form – with the actual futures contracts themselves (more about that1 later). We have traded this spread almost every year since 1994, although the entry and exit parameters have been altered a few times.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 14, No. 6 on March 25, 2005.

In a press release issued on March 18th, the CBOE has announced that option trading on $VIX will begin on Friday, April 22 (2005). We consider this to be a major new derivatives product. It is the first time that there will be the opportunity to trade options on volatility in a listed marketplace (they have traded over-the-counter, institutionally, for some time). In today’s article, we’ll not only look at the mechanics of these options, but at some of the theory as well.

This product will be useful for a wide range of applications for stock and option traders. Wherever $VIX futures were applicable, these options will be as well. Furthermore, option strategies on $VIX can now be constructed – with their own unique sets of risk and reward parameters. As we will discuss in this article, however, $VIX does not behave like a stock, so there will have to be some adjustments for that fact in the modeling of $VIX option prices.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 5, No. 8 on April 25, 1996.

When traders get overly pessimistic, they sometimes create trading opportunities for those who have the patience to wait for the pessimism to reach a peak. In fact, extreme pessimism often leads to panic. Panic doesn't occur too often in the marketplace, but when it does, if you can view things in a level-headed manner, you can find some great trades.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 8, No. 16 on August 26, 1999.

In this article, we’re going to look at a market tendency that has a long, reliable track record: a tradeable top usually appears in September – often near Labor Day – culminating in a good trading bottom sometime in October. This is a subject that we have addressed before, but not for the past three years. Fairly often, these turning points have been accompanied by market buy or sell signals from our oscillator and/or the equity-only put-call ratio.

This year, a buy signal has just been registered by the oscillator (see page 5 for further details). But that just might fit right in with the broad seasonal tendency. The market could rally into Labor Day or slightly beyond, then register a sell signal, and therefore fit right into the “normal” pattern. This is not one of those patterns that I would recommend trading without confirmation. In other words, just don’t go out and short the market on Labor Day, figuring that you’ll be able to cover at a nice profit by early October. Rather, it is more useful as a guide: be alert for sell signals in September, and when one occurs, be ready to jump on it. Then, if it works and the market is getting hammered in October, be alert for buy signals at that time.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 15, No. 10 on May 25, 2006.

In our last issue, we discussed the viability of buying a stock after event-driven news has caused the stock to gap. The conclusion was that there was a small potential profit there, but we are continuing to gather data on that subject. In this issue, we want to take a different tack: does it make sense to buy straddles on stocks that are about to report earnings? In particular, what about the stocks where traders expect the most action – i.e., those with inflated implied volatility prior to the earnings report? This is not an entirely new subject for this newsletter (reference issues 7:04, 9:20, and 13:16, for example), but it is the first time we’ve addressed this issue in a while. Furthermore, we are still of the opinion that this past quarter saw a new, higher level of earnings speculation than ever before.

By Lawrence G. McMillan

This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 15, No. 20 on October 26, 2006.

We have written a couple of articles recently on naked put writing and put credit spreads as alternative strategies to covered call writing. We are not going to re-hash all of that previous information (although we will summarize it). Rather, this short article is mainly to address the topic of what sorts of returns can one expect from naked put writing – and what do they mean?

Many covered writers prefer to conduct the strategy on a cash basis – buying shares for cash and selling the option premium against those shares. The premium can then be withdrawn and used for whatever the writer wants – as long as he is willing to have the stock called away.