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By Kim
The study was done today - here is the link. The parameters of the study:
Use AAPL and GMCR as underlying. Buy a ATM straddle option 20 days before earnings. Sell it just before the announcement. The results of the study, based on 48 cycles (2009-2014)
AAPL P/L: -$2933 GMCR P/L: -$2070 Based on those results, they declared (once again) that buying a straddle before earnings is a losing strategy.
What's wrong with this study?
Dismissing the whole strategy based on two stocks is completely wrong. You could say that this strategy does not work for those two stocks. This would be a correct statement. Indeed, we do not use those two stocks for our straddles strategy. From our experience, entering 20 days before earnings is usually not the best time. On average, the ideal time to enter is around 5-10 days before earnings. This when the stocks experience the largest IV spike. But it is also different from stock to stock. The study does not account for gamma scalping. Which means that if the stock moves, you can adjust the strikes of the straddle or buy/sell stock against it. Many times the stock would move back and forward from the strike, allowing you to adjust several times. In addition, the study is probably based on end of day prices, and from our experience, the end of day price on the last day is usually near the day lows, and you have a chance to sell at higher prices earlier. The study completely ignores the straddle prices. We always look at prices before entering and compare them to previous cycles. Entering the right stocks at the right time at the right prices is what gives this strategy an edge. Not selecting random stocks, random timing and ignoring the prices.
As a side note, presenting the results as dollar P/L on one contract trade is meaningless. GMCR is trading around $150 today, and pre-earnings straddle options cost is around $1,500. In 2009, the stock was around $30, and pre-earnings straddle cost was around $500. Would you agree that 10% gain (or loss) on $1,500 trade is different than 10% gain (or loss) on $500 trade? The only thing that matters is percentage P/L, not dollar P/L.
Presenting dollar P/L could potentially severely skew the study. For example, what if most of the winners were when the stock was at $30-50 but most of the losers when the stock was around $100-150?
Tom Sosnoff and Tony Battista conclude the "study" by saying that "if anybody tells you that you should be buying volatility into earnings, they really haven't done their homework. It really doesn't work".
At SteadyOptions, buying pre-earnings straddle options is one of our key strategies. Check out our performance page for full results. As you can see from our results, the strategy works very well for us. We don't do studies, we do live trading, and our results are based on hundreds real trades.
Of course the devil is in the details. There are many moving parts to this strategy:
When to enter? Which stocks to use? How to manage the position? When to take profits? And much more.
So we will let tastytrade to do their "studies", and we will continue trading the strategy and make money from it. After all, as one of our members said, someone has to be on the other side of our trades. Actually, I would like to thank tastytrade for continuing providing us fresh supply of sellers for our strategy!
If you want to learn more how to use it (and many other profitable strategies):
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How We Made 23% On QIHU Straddle In 4 Hours
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By Kim
As a reminder, a strangle involves buying calls and puts on the same stock with different strikes. Buying calls and puts with the same strike is called a long straddle. Strangles usually provide better leverage in case the stock moves significantly.
So let’s see how it works. First, you must identify stocks which have a history of big post-earnings moves. Some examples include AMZN, Netflix, Google, Priceline (PCLN), and others. Then you buy a strangle or a straddle a day or two before the earnings are announced. If the stock has a big move, you sell for a big profit.
The problem is you are not the only one knowing that earnings are coming. Everyone knows that those stocks move a lot after earnings, and everyone bids those options. Following the laws of supply and demand, those options become very expensive before earnings. The IV (Implied Volatility) jumps to the roof. The next day the IV crashes to the normal levels and the options trade much cheaper.
Let’s examine a few test cases from the 2011 earnings cycle.
AKAM announced earnings on Oct. 26. The $24 straddle could be purchased for $4.08. IV was 84%. The next day the stock jumped 15%, yet the straddle was worth only $3.81. The reason? IV collapsed to 47%. The market “expected” the stock to move 17-18%, based on previous moves, but the stock moved “only” 15% and the straddle lost 7%. BIDU announced earnings on Oct. 26. The stock moved 4.5% following the earnings. You could purchase the straddle at $19.55 the day before earnings. The same straddle was worth $13.47 the next day. That’s a loss of 31%. TIVO moved 2%, the straddle lost 29%. FSLR moved 3%, the straddle lost 55%. Now let’s check a couple of good trades.
NFLX announced earnings on October 24. The stock collapsed 34.9% the next day, a move of historical proportions. The 120 strangle could be purchased the day before earnings at $24.52 and sold the next day at $43.00. That’s a 75% gain, but this is as good as it gets. This is a move of historic proportions but the trade is even not a double. AMZN straddle gained 57%. CME straddle gained 62%. GMCR straddle gained 84%. It is easy to get excited after a few trades like NFLX, GMCR, CME and AMZN. However, we have to remember that those stocks experienced much larger moves than their average move in the last few cycles. In some cases, the move was double what was expected. NFLX and GMCR moved more than 35%, the largest moves in at least 10 years. Chances are this is not going to happen every cycle. There is no reliable way to predict those events. The big question is the long term expectancy of the strategy. It is very important to understand that for the strategy to make money it is not enough for the stock to move. It has to move more than the markets expect. In some cases, even a 15-20% move might not be enough to generate a profit.
Some people might argue that if the trade is not profitable the same day, you can continue holding or selling only the winning side till the stock moves in the right direction. It can work under certain conditions. For example, if you followed the specific stock in the last few cycles and noticed some patterns, such as the stock continuously moving in the same direction for a few days after beating the estimates. Another example is holding the calls when the general market is in uptrend (or downtrend for the puts).
However, it has nothing to do with the original strategy. From the minute you decide to hold that trade, you are no longer using the original strategy. If the stock didn’t move enough to generate a profit, you must be ready to make a judgement call by selling one side and taking a directional bet. This might work for some people, but the pure performance of the strategy can be measured only by looking at a one day change of the strangle or the straddle (buying a day before earnings, selling the next day).
The bottom line:
Over time the options tend to overprice the potential move. Those options experience huge volatility drop the day after the earnings are announced. In most cases, this drop erases most of the gains, even if the stock had a substantial move.
Jeff Augen, a successful options trader and author of six books, agrees:
It doesn’t necessarily mean that the strategy cannot work and produce great results. However, in most cases, you should be prepared to hold beyond the earnings day, in which case the performance will be impacted by many other factors, such as your trading skills, general market conditions etc.
To hedge your bets and reduce the loss if the stock doesn't move, you might consider trading a Reverse Iron Condor.
This article was originally published here.
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By Kim
However, not all stocks are suitable for that strategy. Some stocks experience consistent pattern of losses when buying premium before earnings. For those stocks we are using some alternative strategies like calendars.
In one of my previous articles I described a study done by tastytrade, claiming that buying premium before earnings does not work. Let's leave aside the fact that the study was severely flawed and skewed by buying "future ATM straddle" which simply doesn't make sense (see the article for full details). Today I want to talk about the stocks they used in the study: TSLA, LNKD, NFLX, AAPL, GOOG.
Those stocks are among the worst candidates for a straddle option strategy. In fact, they are so bad that they became our best candidates for a calendar spread strategy (which is basically the opposite of a straddle strategy). Here are our results from trading those stocks in the recent cycles:
TSLA: +28%, +31%, +37%, +26%, +26%, +23% LNKD: +30%, +5%, +40%, +33% NFLX: +10%, +20%, +30%, +16%, +30%, +32%, +18% GOOG: +33%, +33%, +50%, -7%, +26%
You read this right: 21 winners, only one small loser.
This cycle was no exception: all four trades were winners, with average gain of 25.2%.
I'm not sure if tastytrade used those stocks on purpose to reach the conclusion they wanted to reach, but the fact remains. To do a reliable study, it is not enough to take a random list of stocks and reach a conclusion that a strategy doesn't work.
At SteadyOptions we spend hundreds of hours of backtesting to find the best parameters for our trades:
Which strategy is suitable for which stocks? When is the optimal time to enter? How to manage the position? When to take profits?
The results speak for themselves. We booked 147% ROI in 2014 and 32% ROI so far in 2015. All results are based on real trades, not some kind of hypothetical or backtested random study.
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The Less Risky Way To Trade TSLA
If you want to learn more how to use our profitable strategies and increase your odds:
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By Kim
About six months ago, I came across an excellent book by Jeff Augen, “The Volatility Edge in Options Trading”. One of the strategies described in the book is called “Exploiting Earnings - Associated Rising Volatility”. Here is how it works:
Find a stock with a history of big post-earnings moves. Buy a strangle for this stock about 7-14 days before earnings. Sell just before the earnings are announced. For those not familiar with the strangle strategy, it involves buying calls and puts on the same stock with different strikes. If you want the trade to be neutral and not directional, you structure the trade in a way that calls and puts are the same distance from the underlying price. For example, with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) trading at $190, you could buy $200 calls and $180 puts.
IV (Implied Volatility) usually increases sharply a few days before earnings, and the increase should compensate for the negative theta. If the stock moves before earnings, the position can be sold for a profit or rolled to new strikes.
Like every strategy, the devil is in details. The following questions need to be answered:
Which stocks should be used? I tend to trade stocks with post-earnings moves of at least 5-7% in the last four earnings cycles; the larger the move the better. When to buy? IV starts to rise as early as three weeks before earnings for some stocks and just a few days before earnings for others. Buy too early and negative theta will kill the trade. Buy too late and you might miss the big portion of the IV increase. I found that 5-7 days usually works the best. Which strikes to buy? If you go far OTM (Out of The Money), you get big gains if the stock moves before earnings. But if the stock doesn’t move, closer to the money strikes might be a better choice. Since I don’t know in advance if the stock will move, I found deltas in the 20-30 range to be a good compromise. The selection of the stocks is very important to the success of the strategy. The following simple steps will help with the selection:
Click here. Filter stocks with movement greater than 5% in the last 3 earnings. For each stock in the list, check if the options are liquid enough. Using those simple steps, I compiled a list of almost 100 stocks which fit the criteria. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), F5 Networks (NASDAQ:FFIV), Priceline (PCLN), Amazon (AMZN), First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR), Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (NASDAQ:GMCR), Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM), Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG), Saleforce (NYSE:CRM), Wynn Resorts (NASDAQ:WYNN), Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) are among the best candidates for this strategy. Those stocks usually experience the largest pre-earnings IV spikes.
So I started using this strategy in July. The results so far are promising. Average gains have been around 10-12% per trade, with an average holding period of 5-7 days. That might not sound like much, but consider this: you can make about 20 such trades per month. If you allocate just 5% per trade, you earn 20*10%*0.05=10% return per month on the whole account while risking only 25-30% (5-6 trades open at any given time). Does it look better now?
Under normal conditions, a strangle trade requires a big and quick move in the underlying. If the move doesn’t happen, the negative theta will kill the trade. In case of the pre-earnings strangle, the negative theta is neutralized, at least partially, by increasing IV. In some cases, the theta is larger than the IV increase and the trade is a loser. However, the losses in most cases are relatively small. Typical loss is around 10-15%, in some rare cases it might reach 25-30%. But the winners far outpace the losers and the strategy is overall profitable.
Market environment also plays a role in the strategy performance. The strategy performs the best in a volatile environment when stocks move a lot. If none of the stocks move, most of the trades would be around breakeven or small losers. Fortunately, over time, stocks do move. In fact, big chunk of the gains come from stock movement and not IV increases. The IV increase just helps the trade not to lose in case the stock doesn’t move.
In the next article I will explain why, in my opinion, it usually doesn’t pay to hold through earnings. We always close those trade before earnings to avoid IV crush.
The original article was published here.
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By Kim
Here is how their methodology works:
In theory, if you knew exactly what price a stock would be immediately before earnings, you could purchase the corresponding straddle a number of days beforehand. To test this, we looked at the past 4 earnings cycles in 5 different stocks. We recorded the closing price of each stock immediately before the earnings announcement. We then went back 14 days and purchased the straddle using the strikes recorded on the close prior to earnings. We closed those positions immediately before earnings were to be reported.
Study Parameters:
TSLA, LNKD, NFLX, AAPL, GOOG Past 4 earnings cycles 14 days prior to earnings - purchased future ATM straddle Sold positions on the close before earnings
The results:
Future ATM straddle produced average ROC of -19%.
As an example:
In the previous cycle, TSLA was trading around $219 two weeks before earnings. The stock closed around $201 a day before earnings. According to tastytrade methodology, they would buy the 200 straddle 2 weeks before earnings. They claim that this is the best case scenario for buying pre-earnings straddles.
My Rebuttal
Wait a minute.. This is a straddle, not a calendar. For a calendar, the stock has to trade as close to the strike as possible to realize the maximum gain. For a straddle, it's exactly the opposite:
When you buy a straddle, you want the stock to move away from your strike, not towards the strike. You LOSE the maximum amount of money if the stock moves to the strike.
In case of TSLA, if you wanted to trade pre-earnings straddle 2 weeks before earnings when the stock was at $219, you would purchase the 220 straddle, not 200 straddle. If you do that, you start delta neutral and have some gamma gains when the stock moves to $200. But if you start with 200 straddle, your initial setup is delta positive, while you know that the stock will move against you.
It still does not guarantee that the straddle will be profitable. You need to select the best timing (usually 5-7 days, not 14 days) and select the stocks carefully (some stocks are better candidates than others). But using tastytrade methodology would GUARANTEE that the strategy will lose money 90% of the time. It almost feels like they deliberately used those parameters to reach the conclusion they wanted.
As a side note, the five stocks they selected for the study are among the worst possible candidates for this strategy. It almost feels like they selected the worst possible parameters in terms of strike, timing and stocks, in order to reach the conclusion they wanted to reach.
At SteadyOptions, buying pre-earnings straddles is one of our key strategies. It works very well for us. Check out our performance page for full results. As you can see from our results, "Buying Premium Prior To Earnings" is still alive and kicking. Not exactly "Nail In The Coffin".
Comment: the segment has been removed from tastytrade website, which shows that they realized how absurd it was. We linked to the YouTube video which is still there.
Of course the devil is in the details. There are many moving parts to this strategy:
When to enter? Which stocks to use? How to manage the position? When to take profits?
And much more. But overall, this strategy has been working very well for us. If you want to learn more how to use it (and many other profitable strategies):
Subscribe to SteadyOptions now and experience the full power of options trading at your fingertips. Click the button below to get started!
Join SteadyOptions Now!
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By Kim
In this article, I will show why it might be not a good idea to keep those options straddles through earnings.
As a reminder, a straddle involves buying calls and puts on the same stock with same strikes and expiration. Buying calls and puts with the different strikes is called a long strangle. Strangles usually provide better leverage in case the stock moves significantly.
Under normal conditions, a straddle/strangle trade requires a big and quick move in the underlying. If the move doesn’t happen, the negative theta will kill the trade. In case of the pre-earnings strangle, the negative theta is neutralized, at least partially, by increasing IV.
The problem is you are not the only one knowing that earnings are coming. Everyone knows that some stocks move a lot after earnings, and everyone bids those options. Following the laws of supply and demand, those options become very expensive before earnings. The IV (Implied Volatility) jumps to the roof. The next day the IV crushes to the normal levels and the options trade much cheaper.
Over time the options tend to overprice the potential move. Those options experience huge volatility drop the day after the earnings are announced. In many cases, this drop erases most of the gains, even if the stock had a substantial move. In order to profit from the trade when you hold through earnings, you need the stock not only to move, but to move more than the options "predicted". If they don't, the IV collapse will cause significant losses.
Here is a real trade that one of the options "gurus" recommended to his followers before TWTR earnings:
Buy 10 TWTR Nov15 34 Call
Buy 10 TWTR Nov15 28 Put
The rationale of the trade:
Last quarter, the stock had the following price movement after reporting earnings:
Jul 29, 2015 32.59 33.24 31.06 31.24 92,475,800 31.24
Jul 28, 2015 34.70 36.67 34.14 36.54 42,042,100 36.54
I am expecting a similar price move this quarter, if not more. With the new CEO for TWTR having the first earnings report, the conference call and comments will most likely move the stock more than the actual numbers. I will be suing a Strangle strategy. 9/10.
Fast forward to the next day after earnings:
As you can see, the stock moved only 1.5%, the IV collapsed 20%+, and the trade was down 55%.
Of course there are always exceptions. Stocks like NFLX, AMZN, GOOG tend on average to move more than the options imply before earnings. But it doesn't happen every cycle. Last cycle for example NFLX options implied 13% move while the stock moved "only" 8%. A straddle held through earnings would lose 32%. A strangle would lose even more.
It is easy to get excited after a few trades like NFLX, GMCR or AMZN that moved a lot in some cycles. However, chances are this is not going to happen every cycle. There is no reliable way to predict those events. The big question is the long term expectancy of the strategy. It is very important to understand that for the strategy to make money it is not enough for the stock to move. It has to move more than the markets expect. In some cases, even a 15-20% move might not be enough to generate a profit.
Jeff Augen, a successful options trader and author of six options trading books, agrees:
“There are many examples of extraordinary large earnings-related price spikes that are not reflected in pre-announcement prices. Unfortunately, there is no reliable method for predicting such an event. The opposite case is much more common – pre-earnings option prices tend to exaggerate the risk by anticipating the largest possible spike.”
Related Articles:
How We Trade Straddle Option Strategy Buying Premium Prior to Earnings Can We Profit From Volatility Expansion into Earnings Long Straddle: A Guaranteed Win?
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By Kim
The reason is simple: over time the options tend to overprice the potential move. Those options experience huge volatility drop the day after the earnings are announced. In many cases, this drop erases most of the gains, even if the stock had a substantial move. In order to profit from the trade when you hold through earnings, you need the stock not only to move, but to move more than the options "predicted". If they don't, the IV collapse will cause significant losses.
Kirk Du Plessis from OptionAlpha seems to agree.
He conducted a backtest proving that holding a straddle through earnings is on average a losing proposition.
Here are the highlights of his research.
Key Points:
Often times traders go through cycles where the stock makes incredibly big moves. This encourages traders to buy long straddles heading into earnings; a long call/put at the money assuming that the stock will make a big move so that you can profit from it. However, it is not the case that the stock always consistently moves more than expected in the long term. The market is smart enough to overcorrect and implied volatility always overshoots the expected move, on average. Case Study 1: Apple
Did a long straddle every time earnings were present, all the way back to 2007 through now. This is a lot of earnings cycles and a lot of different information for Apple. Since then Apple has had a considerable move, which really challenges the validity of the strategies. We entered a long straddle at the money the day before earnings and took it off the next day. The stock was trading at $90; we bought the 90 put and the 90 call and closed it right after earnings were announced the next morning.
Results:
A long straddle in Apple for earnings only ended up winning 41.38% of the time. The average return over 10 years was -1.31%. Over the long haul, a long option strategy results in a negative expected return, especially in a stock like Apple. On the opposite end of this trade, if you had done the short straddle instead of buying options, you would have generated at least 60% of the time and expected a positive return. The straddle price before earnings, on average, was $15. The straddle price directly after earnings went down to about $7.95; not a great choice for long-option buyers. Case Study 2: Facebook
Entered the same long straddle position, entering right before earnings were announced and exiting again right after earnings were announced. This strategy only won 27% of the time, which is a huge miss for Facebook percentage-wise. These long options strategy simply do not perform as well as we think over time.
Results:
Had an annual return of 0.70%. Only a couple of months ended up being the determining factor to keep it above board. If you missed a couple of those really big moves or if Facebook moved much higher than expected, then it would have resulted in a much more negative return. On the counter side, if you had traded the short option strategy it would have worked out well, generating a positive expected return. On average, the market priced these straddles at about $5.62 before earnings. After they announced earnings, the straddle pricing went down to $1.78. The key was that the crash in the volatility and the straddle pricing is really why this strategy was a big loser. However, this was a really good winner for option sellers. The average expected move in Facebook was $6.45 and the actual expected move on Facebook was $7.09. Facebook out-performed on average. If you could remove the biggest outlier from 2013, then Facebook under-performs by $6.16. More recently, Facebook has begun to consistently under-perform its expected moves. Case Study 3: Chipotle
With Chipotle we used the same strategy as with Apple and Facebook, entering into a long straddle right before earnings and exiting it right after earnings.
Results:
The overall win rate was 35.48%. The average annual return was -2.59%, losing a significant amount of money in the trade. This again consistently led option sellers to be the beneficiaries of the earnings trade in Chipotle. The average price of the straddle heading into the earnings event was 26.26%. The stock went from the low 60's, all the way up to the 600's and back down to 400 - so the straddles are naturally going to be more pricey. On average the straddle price was 26.26 and after earnings the straddle price was 11.21, collapsing by more than half. There are huge moves in Chipotle, but they do not overshadow what actually happened in the long term. Expected move in Chipotle was 7.01 and the actual move was 5.28 - the market vastly underperformed. Conclusion:
After big moves, we start to see expected moves and the stock expands and then smaller moves follow. Generally speaking, when the stock outperforms the expectation the next couple of cycles end up being fairly quiet. If we do find ourselves in a quiet period where the stock has performed really well, we should be careful that it could surprise us shortly. Likewise, if the stock has been really volatile and has outperformed and moved more than expected in the last couple of cycles that means we could potentially be more aggressive as it might underperform heading forward. Generally, there is also a lag time between the market catching up - earnings trades only happen four times a year. The market participants don't get a lot of data throughout the year to make changes to expectations and trading habits. If the stock has a huge move after earnings, more than expected, it might take a cycle or two for the options pricing to catch up and realize the new normal. At the end of the day, realizing how much these numbers gravitate towards what they should be on average, long-term is really powerful. You can listen to the full podcast here.
This research confirms what we already knew:
It is easy to get excited after a few trades like NFLX, GMCR or AMZN that moved a lot in some cycles. However, chances are this is not going to happen every cycle. There is no reliable way to predict those events. The big question is the long term expectancy of the strategy. It is very important to understand that for the strategy to make money it is not enough for the stock to move. It has to move more than the markets expect. In some cases, even a 15-20% move might not be enough to generate a profit.
Thank you Kirk!
The next question is of course: if holding a long straddle through earnings is a losing proposition, why not to take the other side and short those straddles?
But lets leave something for the next article..
Related articles:
How We Trade Straddle Option Strategy Buying Premium Prior To Earnings - Does It Work? Can We Profit From Volatility Expansion Into Earnings? Long Straddle: A Guaranteed Win? Why We Sell Our Straddles Before Earnings Selling Strangles Prior To Earnings Straddle Option Overview
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By Mark Wolfinger
I was taught that one of the assumptions used in this strategy is that for the most part, the market has all ready priced the option correctly for the upcoming news so by allowing for some price movement within your strangle, this is more of a volatility play than a price play.
Mark's response:
1) To me they are the same, with the straddle being a subset of the strangle In other words, a straddle is merely a strangle when the strikes and expiration dates are the same.
I prefer the strangle because it allows the trader to choose call and put strike prices independently, rather than being 'forced' to choose the same strike. I prefer to sell OTM calls and puts – and that's not possible with a straddle.
As far as unlimited risk is concerned, that's a decision for each trader. I prefer the smaller reward and increased safety of selling credit spreads (an iron condor position), but that is not relevant to today's post.
2) A clarification. In is not 'volatility' that incurs a large decrease after the news is released. Instead it is the implied volatility of the options. I'm fairly certain that is what you meant to say.
3) Your earnings plays are far riskier than you currently believe them to be. These are not horrible trades, but neither are they as simple as you make them out to be.
4) I must disagree with whomever it was who told you that "the market has priced the option correctly for the upcoming news." The market has made an estimate of how much the stock price is likely to move. Note that this move may be either higher or lower ad that this difference is ignored when the size of the move is estimated.
There is no formal prediction of move size. There is nothing that says the stock will move 6.35 points. What happens is the implied volatility rises as longs as more and more buyers send orders to purchase options. And it makes no difference if they are calls or puts. At some point option prices stabilize (or the market closes for the day) and a 'final' implied volatility can be measured.
From the IV, the 'anticipated move' for the underlying is determined. AsI said, it's not as is everyone agreed on how much the stock will move.
I hope you understand that when the news is released, there is very little chance that the predicted move is the correct move. Many times the move is far less than expected. That's the reason why selling options prior to earnings can be very profitable. The IV collapses because another substantial price change is NOT expected and there is no reason to pay a high IV to buy either calls or puts.
However, if you chose to sell an option that was not very far out of the money (OTM), and if the stock moves far enough, then the IV crush. doesn't do a whole lot of good. Sure you gain as IV plunges, but you can easily incur a substantial loss when the short option has moved significantly into the money.
Also remember that part of the time that stock price gaps by far more than expected. In that scenario, a higher quantity of formerly OTM options are now ITM. Thus, large losses are not only possible, but they are more frequent that you realize. Apparently your trades have worked out well (so far).
Think about this: If those option buyers did not profit often enough to encourage them to pay 'high' prices for the options they buy, they would have stopped buying them long ago. The truth is that these option buyers collect often enough to keep them coming back for more.
5) That means you must be selective in which options you sell into earnings news. This is especially true when you elect to sell naked options. You cannot options on every stock, hoping that any random play will work. This is a high risk/high reward game. It's okay to participate, but please be aware of what you are doing and the risk involved.
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By ORATS_Matt
For this reason, front month expirations will generally have higher IVs than back months. After earnings, the implied volatility falls more in the front months than in the back months for this reason.
There are various measurements to view this effect. Measuring the effect starts with estimating where IV will fall in each of the expirations. This can be accomplished by estimating an earnings effect in each month and varying the effect until the relationship between the IVs make a rational term structure. A rational term structure is where the expirations fit into a smooth curve drawn over time. The term structure is not necessarily a flat as many calculations use. Sometimes the term structure will solve to contango, with aa lower front month, or in backwardation with higher front IVs than back month IVs.
When the part of IV that is the earnings effect is extracted from the raw IV, an ex-earnings IV can be compared. Below is a list of stocks with IV 30 day divided by ex-earnings IV 30 day sorted from highest to lowest.
UPS is the highest ratio at 1.31 with the IV=49.48% and ex earnings IV=37.78%.
Here's a view of the monthly unadjusted ATM IV for UPS. May 27th is about 30 days out and the IV is 48%. Constructing a rational term structure taking out an earnings effect over the months makes a 38% ex earnings IV for May 27th. The front month of 4/29/22 trading at 106% IV is expected to come down to 47%. The term structure, post earnings is still in backwardwardation.
An options trade to take advantage of this high IV vs ex earnings IV is a time spread or calendar spread.
The May-20 June-17 $185 Long Call Calendar has the following profile:
The break even points are estimated at $168.38 -9% and $205 +11%.
The history of UPS moves versus expectations are below:
There are two moves of +14% in the last 12 observations but the rest of the earnings moves would probably result in a winning trade.
About the Author: Matt Amberson, Principal and Founder of Option Research & Technology Services. ORATS was born out of a need by traders to get access to more accurate and realistic option research. Matt started ORATS to support his options market making firm where he would hire statistically minded individuals, put them on the floor, and develop research to aid in trading options. He is heavily involved with product design and quantitative research. ORATS offers data and backtesting on a subscription basis at www.orats.com. Matt has a Master’s degree from Kellogg School of Business.
Related articles:
How We Trade Calendar Spreads Understanding Implied Volatility Few Facts About Implied Volatility What is Volatility Skew -
By Kim
First of all, as a general comment, there is no such thing as guaranteed returns in the stock market. If there was, everyone who is trading the stock market would be a millionaire.
The proposed trade is called a long straddle option.
A long straddle option strategy is vega positive, gamma positive and theta negative trade. That means that all other factors equal, the option straddle will lose money every day due to the time decay, and the loss will accelerate as we get closer to expiration. For the straddle to make money, one of the two things (or both) has to happen:
1. The stock has to move (no matter which direction).
2. The IV (Implied Volatility) has to increase.
In simple terms, Implied Volatility is the amount of stock price fluctuations. Being on the right side of implied volatility changes can enhance the chances of success.
The problem with the proposed setup is that you are not the only one who knows about the event - it’s a public knowledge, so market participants bid the options prices in anticipation of the event, driving IV to higher than usual levels. After the event the IV usually collapses. If the stock moves more than “implied” by the straddle price, then the straddle will be a winner. BUT more often than not, the options prices overprice the potential move, and when the stock moves less than expected, collapsed IV will make the straddle a loser.
Example:
NFLX was scheduled to report earnings on October 15, 2015. The stock was trading around $110, and 110 straddle around 15.50. This price "implied" $15.50 move. The following image presents the P/L chart of the trade:
As we can see, the IV is around 240% for those options, reflecting the upcoming event.
Fast forward 24 hours: the stock moved $9 which is a substantial move, but less than "implied" by the options prices. This is the P/L chart:
As we can see, IV collapsed to ~85%, and the trade has lost 42%.
At SteadyOptions, we trade straddles in a different way. We usually buy a straddle around 7-10 days before the event and sell it 1-2 days before the event when IV peaks. This setup can benefit from the stock moving and/or IV increase.
Related articles:
How We Trade Straddle Option Strategy
Buying Premium Prior to Earnings
Can We Profit From Volatility Expansion into Earnings
Understanding Implied Volatility
How We Made 23% On $QIHU Straddle In 4 Hours
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