Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2018

Managing Risk in an Option Portfolio...

DELTA DOESN'T CUT IT Just a quick post about managing risk in an equity derivative portfolio. A great deal of attention is given to option Greeks when discussing risk management and rightly so.  Greeks are useful tools to delineate the risk of a singe option.  We know delta is the first derivative of the option pricing function and describes the linear change in the price of an option given a change in the underlying security... this is a good thing to know. But what happens when we structure trades using multiple options? A few months back, I wrote a piece on using vol skew to structure a bearish position on the SPY: http://tancockstradingblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/using-vol-skew-to-short-raging-bull_5.html Here, I showed how shorting mispriced options can be an effective way to structure a trade to capture market drawdowns.  The example used was to short 23 contracts of a 30 day put that was far out of the money and buy two individual puts closer to the money (the SPY was trading

The Last Line of Defense...

BACKSTOPPED The NHL playoffs are in full swing and at this time of year a hot goaltender is often the difference between winning and losing. Hockey's history is a cautionary tale for any highly favored team to not overlook an opponent with a hot goalie: Jim Craig in the 1980 Olympics, Mike Richter in the 1996 World Cup, Ryan Miller in the 2010 Olympics (very nearly won), Jonathan Quick in the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs. In hockey, the goalie backstops the team and is the last line of defense against an aggressive opposition. In today's equity market, the last line of defense against an aggressive breakdown has been the S&P's 200 day moving average.  Over the course of the past 29 trading days, the support level has backstopped falling markets a total of 8 times - today included. But what happens if this level fails to hold the next wave of selling?  When tested a few weeks back, the market had already expended a lot of energy just to get to that point as price level vari