EugeneHill

Yes Chris great you have your own column!

Have you looked into this more? I just checked, vxx @ 11.51, 10/11/12/13 ric is going for .30. I'm not going to take it though, the bid on the 10 is 0, and I already have a lot going on in vxx which is down pretty big for me. Still, this seems abnormally inexpensive.

I think that's the idea. Seems like you'd want to do it right at the IV peak which I would guess is normally the last trading day before earnings. That would also allow you to place both sides of the calendar in the appropriate spot.

Thanks for the details Chris. Did you target a particular delta when you bought the long side of this? That long cost you about 25k right?

Did you discuss the specifics of that DITM AAPL trade on this board? I'm doing something similar for MMM and VIX and so far so good, I'd be interested in an AAPL one too. Do you typically sell your weekly short right at the money?

I exited my weekly 560 calendar for an overall $250 loss which was small percentage wise. Long was August.

I'm at another decision point in my aug/jun2 AAPL 560 call calendar spread. The theta is almost completely gone from the jun2 option which is going for $11.5 more than I sold it for. The theta is almost gone too, so almost all of its value is intrinsic. The delta is close to 100 for the short side, the long side's delta is 67, so for every $1 that AAPL rises the value of the spread drops by about $30. I'll wait to see what happens today, but I want to have a plan My choices: 1) wait, hope the short doesn't get exercised, look to roll tomorrow when the new weeklies come out, maybe to a higher strike. 2) close out both sides, take the loss which over the 3 weeks I've had it open would be about $300 3) roll the short up to a strike that still has extrinsic value (to avoid exercise). A 5 point roll would cost $500, 10 point about $900. 4) roll both sides up, using some of the gains on the long (5.5 points) to defray the loss on the short (-11.5 points). 5) something else, convert to a double calendar? This still wouldn't help the short 560 though. Thanks for your thoughts. Pre-market it looks like AAPL is pretty flat, so I don't think I can count on much of a drop.

I forgot #6: 6) get busy @ work and forget to do anything haha. which turns out to probably have been the best thing, things settled down a little later in the day, and today a straight 560->560 roll brought in 3.68. I had just opened that aug-jun2 calendar, and as somebody pointed out the first couple of weeks of this type of play could lose money. Can anybody recommend a book/site (besides steadyoptions ) that discusses calendars? I got the Iron condor book by Benkilfa and am enjoying that, thank you whoever recommended it.

My 560 aug/jun2 AAPL calendar is looking kind of sick. With two big up days in AAPL there's not a whole lot of theta left in the short weekly and I suspect in danger of exercise since it's 16+ points under water. I can roll to a 560 jun for $3 credit. Here are my thoughts, please offer opinions, I take full responsibility of course, I just want other ideas: 1) hold the weekly until tomorrow, squeeze the last .50 of theta out 2) go ahead and roll to a 560 jun for $3+ 3) close out the spread (~$350 loss) 4) roll the 560 to a 570 jun at a cost of about $375 5) create a double calendar at 575? anything else? My normal inclination would be #3, just take my lumps and move on, but I wouldn't mind trying something else. Thanks

It seems counterintuitive that BOTH an RIC and calendar can make money on the same stock, it seems like they're voting against each other. Maybe the rich options prices on AAPL make this possible? Or different time-frames? Or luck? I too opened a 560 Aug/Jun2 call calendar on AAPL. 1 spread, showing a profit already. My calendar on XOM is sucking wind, IBM and MCD have slight losses for the past month.