This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 8, No. 17 on September 9, 1999.
As most of our subscribers know, we often use option premium levels as an aid in predicting what might happen to the underlying instrument – whether it be an index, a futures contract, or stock. The way that we normally speak about option premium levels is to refer to the implied volatility of the options. Implied volatility is really an attempt to determine how volatile the underlying will be during the life of the option. As implied volatility increases, so does time value premium – and hence the option price. So that an option with a very high implied volatility will be a very costly option, and it will have a great deal of time value premium.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 19, No. 4 on February 25, 2010.
We have recently recommended a couple of butterfly spreads involving earnings situations, while in the past we’ve used dual calendar spreads. In addition, we sometimes use straddle purchases for other events – such as FDA hearings. Butterflies and calendars are apropos for FDA events as well. In this article, we’re going to refine which strategy is best for which situation, for each has its own merits and deficiencies.
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.
