Assumes working knowledge of options and a willingness to learn about new things — like volatility
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 …
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. …
My count of volatility US-based ETPs trading on national exchanges is at 8 as of March 30th, 2022. New Additions: A new player in the volality ETP space, Volatility Shares, introduced two new ETFs, the -1X leveraged short term SVIX and the 2X leveraged UVIX on March 30th, 2022. These funds use two new Cboe indexes, SHORTVOL and LONGVOL which use time-weighted averages of VIX …
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 …
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 …
