This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 8, No. 7 on April 8, 1999.
Statistics are used to estimate stock price movement (and futures and indices as well) in many areas of financial analysis. For example, we have written extensively about the use of probabilities to aid us in choosing viable option strategies. Stock mutual fund managers often use volatility estimates to help them determine how risky their portfolio is. The uses are myriad. Unfortunately, almost all of these applications are wrong! Okay, maybe wrong is too strong of a word, but almost all estimates of stock price movement are overly conservative. This can be very dangerous if one is using such estimates for the purposes of, say, writing naked options or engaging in some other such strategy in which stock price movement is undesirable.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 7, No. 6 on March 26, 1998.
In the course of conversations with other traders or customers, there will occasionally be subjects that come up repeatedly. In this article, we’re going to look at three of them – sort of an article of short subjects. The first is probably the most complicated, as it addresses what volatility to use when trying to project the profitability of an option position. Second, we’ll share some practical insights on trading in futures options – particularly in the New York markets. Finally, we’ve had a lot of questions about one particular usage of our oscillator, so we’ll address that topic as well.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 5, No. 9 on May 9, 1996.
The concept of volatility, and especially implied volatility is extremely important for option traders. We often refer to implied volatility, for it is the foundation of many of our strategies. However, when meeting the public, I find that many people don't have a clear concept of what implied volatility is, so this article will be educational for some readers, and merely review for others.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 3, No. 10 on May 27, 1994.
We have, in the past, often written about the fact that options can be used to help spot "hot" stocks, such as potential takeover candidates. Option premiums tend to inflate and/or option volume tends to increase prior to a major fundamental news event concerning the stock. The reason for this, of course, is that "insiders" — those who have prior knowledge of the news, or at least have a very educated guess — buy options because of the tremendous leverage available from the profitable purchase of an option.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 5, No. 9 on May 9, 1996.
The concept of volatility, and especially implied volatility is extremely important for option traders. We often refer to implied volatility, for it is the foundation of many of our strategies. However, when meeting the public, I find that many people don't have a clear concept of what implied volatility is, so this article will be educational for some readers, and merely review for others.
This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 3, No. 21 on November 17, 1994.
Volatility is merely the term that we use to describe how fast a stock, future, or index changes in price. When we speak of volatility in connection with options, there are two types of volatility that are important: historical volatility, which is a number that can be calculated mathematically by seeing how fast the stock has been changing in price over the past 10 days, 20 days, or any other time period that we want to examine. The other type of volatility that is important for option traders is implied volatility. Implied volatility is what the options are "saying" about future volatility: if it is high, then the options are predicting that the underlying instrument is going to become more volatile in the (near) future; if it is low, then the options are predicting that the volatility of the underlying will decrease. Thus there may be a difference between the historical and implied volatility. If the difference is large enough, then one can use options strategies to create a position with an "edge" — the "edge" being the differential between these two types of volatility.
