Option spreads, early exercise and other wrinkles

A week ago Monday I created an IEF (iShares Lehman 7-10 Yr Treas Bond) bear spread in my Schwab margin account—with the short calls deep in the money at S90.   Several of the calls were assigned that night when IEF went ex-dividend ($0.248/share).  Since I wasn’t long IEF, this assignment resulted in a short position being created in my account.   I was surprised the calls were assigned since …

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Another brief condor

Similar to last week I don’t expect much market action this week.   I put a SPY condor in place with the quarterly options expiring this Friday the 31st.  The puts were at S123 (buy at .19), S124 (sell-to-open at .33), and the calls at S126 (sell-to-open at .43) and S127 (buy at .16) for a net credit 0f 0.41.   Worst case loss is 0.59. …

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Volatility Tickers

My count of volatility US-based ETPs trading on national exchanges is at 8 as of August 9th, 2024. New Additions: Ticker/Quotes & Leverage Description / Time frame Daily activity? / underlying index ETF / ETNCompany website / Prospectus Comments / Posts ^VIX (Yahoo)$VIX (Schwab)VIX (Fidelity)VIX:IND (Bloomberg).VIX (Reuters)INDEXCBOE:VIX (Google FInance) Cboe Volatility Index®Model-free est. of SPX 30 day volatility VIXDerived from SPX option prices CBOE / …

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CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) Futures data 2004 – Recent

The CBOE posts historical volatility futures quotes, but not in a particularly helpful organization. Each expiration month has a separate spreadsheet, which currently adds up to > 100 different spreadsheets from May 2004 to now. Adding to the difficulties, there are four expiration months in the early years that didn’t exist at all that led to a lot of missing data and a reverse split …

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A brief condor

I don’t think much is going to happen with the market this week.  Trading on that hunch I put a condor position in place Monday with SPY weekly options expiring this Thursday, the 23rd.  The position is composed of short calls (S126 at .11) and short puts (S124 at .38) to create the upside of the position, with long calls (S127 at .04) and long puts(S123 …

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