With the market experiencing extreme volatility as of late, I am considering taking a long(ish) break from high risk trading such as FX and futures, and putting all discretionary cash into 0-to-low risk option spreads, and zooming out my holding time frame. For instance, C is currently trading @ $1.5. June $4/5 PUT spread is around $0.95. Say you short the spread at that price - then your risk is $0.05 a share; should the stock close anywhere above $4.05, you are in the green. I could even imagine an arbitrage opportunity as well, whereby the premium spread is actually higher than the strike interval. Now, identifying specific stocks, strikes and expirations where such plays make sense is obviously tedious, so my question is - does anyone know of a screener that actually lets you pick your trades based on favorable spread prices? Please do not suggest the obvious crap that doesn't do the job, like Y! Finance, OptionsBuddy etc.
Yeah, that would be their search by "% Return" in the bull put credit spread search. Unfortunately, it is broken because that's defined as total premium / total risk or margin. If you run the search with this value set to >= 95%, it will flag a spread with $2 strike interval and $1.9 credit as a 1900% return trade.
Watch the first 15 minutes or so of this webcast for an OptionVue OpScan search for the tightest spreads (02/03/2009 - Bearish X Ratio Double Calendar): http://www.discoveroptions.com/public/pages/education/markethuddle.html With OpScan you can customize your search using OptionVue's database or you can choose your own assets/underlying to perform a search on (such as your C example). You will need OptionVue 6 to use OpScan.