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Just as with our NEHS trades (assuming a 1:1 short to long ratio) if the entry price is less than the distance between the strikes then you cannot have a loss on the upside. However, if the entry price is greater than the distance between the strikes then you could have a loss if the stock price rises too much.

Re the recent discussions of trading results of TM strategies. I have been trading pre earnings momentum calls for the past 6 months. Mostly 14 days pre earnings (with some 7 and 3 days). The strategy involved buying a 30 or 40 delta call for 14 or 30 day expiry and exiting just pre earnings. I have restricted transactions to cases showing better than 6/2 winning records for the past 2 years with better than 20% average returns. As well, I set exit criteria acording to best results in backtesting, although not always following through-usually to my regret. There were 90 trades during this period, of which 58 were profitable and 32 loses. The average return was about 35% with a large variance . Several trades generated over 200% in profit and almost 100% losses. Because of the risk, positions were relatively small, particularly as market movements lead to positively correlated results between trades over any short period. In total ,over the past 6 months the profitable trades generated $21,400 profit and the losing trades generated $6500 in losses on a total of $43,200 at risk. I am very happy with the performance of the strategy. HOWEVER, the period covered was clearly a bull market, so may not be very repreresentative of the longer term results and risks.

The Spanish flu was pegged at 18% mortality, other say 10-20%, hit the youngest the hardest. Deaths were approx 50 million. According to worldinfometer, a worldwide death rate including the initial unprepared spread is 2.2%, US death rate 1.7%. If you look at the numbers in the US, with 18m cases already and look at the probable exposure for millions of others, that 100 million has probably already been passed unless the virus is way less infectious that proposed. You don't listen to the talking heads for your trading, definitely don't listen to them in "Chicken Little" mode, it'll just depress you. Not to say the situation isn't serious, but nothing is ever as bad as the news media says, bad news sells, sells, sells. If they told me the earth was round, I would start reading old medieval texts about a flat earth to be sure. The real challenge is finding someone reporting things honestly. And in the words of one of my heroes, "it is always darkest, just before......it goes completely black".