Out UAL long straddle 5.38 (+1.70 Profit, excluding gamma scalps) and ABT Short Straddle 1.745 (+0.845 profit)
NICE trades dude!! ABT was largest position. KMB was my biggest winner and UTX my biggest loser. . Managed to sneak into the green. UTX was my smallest position I noticed your doing straddle/strangles. I got in touch with Eaun Sinclair a few months ago and he said all earnings plays should either be straddles or strangles and buying the wings is sub optimal. However last year I was short TIF vol (straddle) across earnings. I have never not bought the wings since that day. Implied move was 6%. IT closed 25% higher...................
I agree with him. How many times have wings paid off since then? If you think the vol is rich, then you by definition believe the tail event is overpriced. What's the point of buying the wings then? If you think the vol is cheap, then it's totally dumb to sell the wings. It only makes sense to trade the wings if you think the distribution isn't normal and the market is pricing it as if it were (that is earnings will either be 0 or +/-20% and nothing in between).
Your absolutely right Neww, that trade was just devastating tho. The original straddle was 2% of my account I ended up losing 10% of net liq (it was like 2 months of hard work gone in that one day!). I'll give it another shot with some small positions. Short LUV straddle for 2.62 Short AAL straddle for 2.03
Let's say I looked at the past 50 earnings jumps of TIF and the kurtosis of the returns was 6 and the vol surface for the closest expiration to earnings was flat. Even if implied vol in my opinion was rich, would it make buying the wings reasonable?
Or like FB's move last July. If you can't structure with limited risk, then you shouldn't be playing. IMO.
Hey our AAPL diagonal is doing pretty good! Are you still holding? This topic is really open for debate as Neww has a strong point. However take a look at TIF return distributioin after earnings( rounded to the nearest 10th). [1] -11.800 0.990 23.200 -5.000 -1.580 -1.320 -8.710 2.710 3.150 [10] 6.400 0.000 2.950 3.600 -2.100 10.530 -4.000 2.500 1.000 [19] -0.500 8.680 -1.040 3.950 1.950 -6.170 7.200 -6.810 6.680 [28] -8.700 9.300 8.500 5.100 5.200 -3.150 7.500 0.034 4.900 [37] 11.300 0.085 15.000 Assuming mean 0 and standard deviation 6.9. The chances of up or down 25% move is less than .01 %. So maybe buying the FARFAR otm wings for a few pennies is worth it? I mean remember LULU last year the implied move was 8% and the stock opened up 30% lower! these moves are not from the same sample and hence are rarely(if ever) priced into the implied vol premium. The problem is the DOTM options have 0 liquidity around earnings and hence you end up crossing the tape and paying 5x fair value...
If a 30% move was priced into LULU the ATM vol would have been much higher. How much have the spreads cost you since the TIF debacle? (btw - TIF won't be the last time you burn 2 months of pnl quickly).