This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 18, No. 13 on July 10, 2009.
Everyone enjoys a good speculation now and then – even the most confirmed hedged trader. However, there are a lot of ways to handle a speculative position once it’s in place. In this article, the main focus is going to be on when and where to take profits – as opposed to cutting losses. We’re going to look at several partial profit strategies in an attempt to show what one is really doing to his position in the name of taking profits.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 6, No. 3 on February 6, 1997.
At the Futures South Conference last month, there was a lot of talk about delta neutral strategies. We're going to take a look at what these strategies are, and why they're not as profitable and easy to operate as some advisors would have you believe. I have mentioned in the past that I have some trepidation that too many traders are embarking on delta neutral strategies without understanding that — like any other strategy — they involve work to operate profitably.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 9, No. 16 on August 24, 2000.
It is somewhat common knowledge amongst option traders that the CBOE’s Volatility Index ($VIX) can be used as a predictor of forthcoming market movements. In particular, when volatility is trending to extremely low levels – as it is doing now – it generally means that the market is about to explode. In this article, we’ll put some “hard numbers” to that theory and we’ll also look at alternate measures of volatility (QQQ and the $OEX stocks themselves) to see what they have to say.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 15, No. 2 on January 26, 20006.
The time is nigh for us to once again consider one of our most reliable seasonal trades – the January Seasonal. Simply stated, the system is this: buy “the market” at the close of trading at the close of the 18th trading day of January, and sell your position at the close five days later.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 16, No. 3 on February 16, 2007.
Last month, we saw the standard put-call ratio experience some very herky-jerky movements on its chart. As we pointed out at the time, those distortions were due to heavy dividend arbitrage in Altria (MO), JP Morgan (JPM), and AT&T (T). Since dividend arbitrage has become much more prevalent in recent quarters, we feel it’s time to examine this issue to see if there is something that needs to be done to “cleanse” the data of this extraneous, but extremely heavy, call option volume.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 19, No. 24 on December 24, 2010.
The “January defect” is the first seasonal trade of the year. The “system” states that the NASDAQ-100 usually falls from about the 8th trading day of January to the 18th trading day. The system’s results are shown in Table 1, in the next column.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 6, No. 6 on March 27, 1997.
I was tempted not to label this article as a "basics" article, because the concept we're going to discuss is one that is probably not all that familiar to most option traders. It concerns the rate of decay of in- or at-the-money options versus that of out-of-themoney options. It's a concept that I realized I understood subconsciously, but not one that I had thought about specifically until I recently read Len Yates' article in The Option Vue Informer. Len is the owner and founder of Option Vue, creator of the software package of the same name and is one of the best option "thinkers" in the business (we are going to have a review of Option Vue when their new version is released).
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 13, No. 2 on January 22, 2004.
Question: You have repeatedly mentioned dividend arbitrage. Could you briefly tell me what it is? – J.Z., 1/17/2004
Answer: Dividend arbitrage has been around since listed call options first traded. It has become quite popular lately, though, as heavy call volume is noticeable in nearly every stock with decent open interest in its options that is paying a quarterly dividend of 20 cents or more.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 9, No. 8 on April 27, 2000.
In the past year or two, there have been many references in this newsletter to the fact that stock prices don’t conform to the lognormal distribution, which is the distribution used in many mathematical models that are intended to describe the behavior of stock and option prices. This isn’t new information to mathematicians – papers dating back to the mid-1960's have pointed out that the lognormal distribution is flawed. However, it isn’t a really terrible description of the way that stock prices behave, so many applications have continued to use the lognormal distribution.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 17, No. 6 on March 27, 2008.
Amongst our array of technical indicators is the put-call ratio. We use it extensively in analyzing the broad market (equity-only putcall ratios) as well as individual stocks and, especially, futures. It is less useful in the indices and ETF’s, but sometimes has validity there, as well. Furthermore, we use $VIX derivatives – particularly the futures – as predictors of short-term moves in the broad market as well. These $VIX derivatives have been very useful and accurate indicators, with two or three great “calls” again in the last week. So, the question becomes, should we be looking at put-call ratios on $VIX – trying to combine these two indicators which, separately, have proven to be quite useful in their own right? As you shall see, the answer is not completely clear, but there does seem to be some usefulness in $VIX put-call ratios.
