Essentially delta hedging? Difficult in practice for an amateur retail, too much work, especially for those of us trade discretionary and calculate manually the combined delta, gamma, delta... how many times a day?
I am not very smart most times do things by brute force. Here is what I do if I want to calculate the greeks of say a butterfly: click option chains, type in the underlying, click greek on the header to display options and greeks, then manually add up the delta, gamma, theta... of the three butterfly calls and get the combined delta, gamma, theta... then calculate the # of underlying I want to buy/sell to keep it delta neutral. I used to calculate BSM using a TI calculator, then figured out I better use Excel if I wanted to do a series of BSM calculations or it would take days. But Excel is difficult to perform what if, so I had to go to class to learn VBA. Python is my next project because I want to eventually do what you all do - automate my trades. Being an amateur retail is hard.
My love of wings and teenies doesn't just mean 'close your eyes and blindly buy them.' Options are not necessarily a do one thing and do it over and over again regardless of level. To everything there is a season. A time to be born, a time to die A time to plant, a time to reap A time to kill, a time to heal At high vol, surfaces flatten, change on change diminish, wings don't do give you all the love and happiness they do at low vol going to high vol. It requires you to see surface change, play with it in your mind, move it back and forth along a time horizon, see how it protects or does not protect the rest of your inventory, what's the current skew, are people properly pricing volgamma and voltheta (or whatever you kids call things these days...vanna, zomma, vomit, indica, sativa...)...and on and on... but NEVER, EVER, NEVER, short teenies! ...Then there are other complications. I never liked owning ATM, but if vol was low enough I would, and I'd scalp the shit out of my gamma to defend my position, maybe even to the point of f'k wings, I want pure Vega+Gamma. You already said that's not an option for you. Retail option trading is a bit nuts, but I think I said that on one of my first posts. ...but if I have to answer. It was the 10 delta and less, I loved the most.
Which broker do you use to trade?? TOS lets you simply click on "butterfly" and you specify the width..Problem is for underlying like the SPY,the widest fly you can get price and greeks for is 4 pts wide.But every 4 point fly is shown with the greeks.I wish they would let you do custom widths. I typically just look at price/delta on a Fly and dont worry top much about the rest....