The only thing I understood in your reply was "yeah".... LOL.... But I was happy to see you extend your gratitude! I know you sometimes come off as an asshole, but I know you're just a softie underneath.
The funny thing is that I see sometimes you leave certain information off about your trades, because I assume this will be too close to giving away your edge. But even if you accidentally left all the information there, it still wouldn't mean anything to me! The only thing that I think your graph shows is that at any price above 354, you were profitable, with max profits at 420.
There is nothing special about this. It's a common fly-structure. It resembled the pic, but obviously shifted lower (MSTR price). What's unseen is that the upside is improved a bit due to vol of vol (upside skew). The strip of vols drop a bit while the up/out vols rally a little. Serves to open up the smile, upside.
I take it that you structure your trades so that you limit downside, which means that you also limit the upside? John seems to be willing to risk it all to shoot for a 10x or higher. So was this just another trade for you or a home run?
I've heard the "call skew" and "volatility smile" mentioned a few times on QuantBros youtube and also on Twitter, something that is similar to bitcoin, the higher it goes, the higher the IV goes which is not typical of stocks, unless they are on a massive run, i.e. TSLA or NVDA I'm only repeating stuff, could have messed that up, haha
It was a two week exp. I'm not built to take long term macro swings. Not a home run. I can trade it large as MSTR's vol is printing >200 and the hedges are a reasonable fraction of that figure. I had hedged it in adjacent tickers; ETFs, cash, even miners. You take a long in MSTR and short the correlated. The trick is to hedge price w/o giving back much vol in the hedge. You can be sloppy as the vol-edge acts as "arb (less) correlation" Isolated to MSTR. Long delta, short vol, neutral to long vol of vol. The upper strike gains a bit from vol of vol while strike under the mkt don't carry as much exposure. It's the trivial exposure but it doesn't hurt you. The skew is still above x under the mkt (like equity index). So, the smile (smiles more) when the thing rallies. So long delta, short vol, neutral to long v^2. Hedge is crypto-tickers in flies that acts as a risk reversal as they don't have a lot of x-sectional vol-exposure. MSTR vol at 200. Hedge vols averaging 120 and replicating a bearish risk reversal. The cons are that with the RR there is drift to delta (and other moments). The low Vega in the RR is at the cost of drift (shown below).