I get what you;'re trying to do. FWIW, I trade pairs heavily (long stock against short stock). In broad strokes, it's a similar idea. The advantage to stock over options is that there's so much less slippage and no hassle with lower delta. But this is about you... I'm laboring the point but... I'd suggest that you look for a strangle that might be more OTM and just keep in in place as catastrophic insurance. Accept a somewhat wider loss range and save a bundle on daily in/out trading. One of the things that I do is to shift my hedge bias during the day. If I feel the legs are going up, I add to the long side or reduce the short side, never getting too far from neutral (and vice versa if they're going down)... flattening out to neutral by the end of the day. The idea is to try to trade within the trade rather than add another losing side to it.