I sold RUT straddles on Friday. A couple ER2 680's as well for a friend's account. Did better than 30 on all, but the ER2 weakness late in the day makes 30 improbable tomorrow. I expect weakness tonight and into the day session. I would go with the RUT 670 and ER2 675 handles for new positions. FYI: I never sell bull-delta straddles, always bear-delta in index markets. The skew and delta invert concurrently on my short strikes into a decline.
Not really, A. Gamma will be much a much greater factor at that point. I'll gamma trade the position, but the only vol hedge will consist of flying-off the position, or an offset.
I am also short a lot of vanilla and exotic vol in Nikkei. I am short the SGXNK 15,000 straddle at 850[18.8%]
This is just my own bias of course, but I was actually thinking we see a substantial retrace in early January -- if we end the year at the highs. Of course, that is irrelavant to your position unless you get nailed by a gap. But since I know from the hours of your ET posts that you are really a computer that is awake to trade 24/7, it is unlikely that you will not have an opportunity to hedge.
Barring a large discontinuity I have a bunch of shuttle PCs throughtout the house and a setup in the car with an itronix rugged laptop and car-dock.
Riskarb, Say the emini er2 spot is trading at 680 and I get 30 points on a 680 straddle... how would one go about hedging this position? What if you had a downward bias too? --MIKE
I would go with a lower-strike if you have a bearish-bias. 675 or lower. You can hedge soft-deltas at 1/2/3 deviations on weekly stat-vol, but only if we trade below the strike. If we rally I may offset, but it's unlikely that I would cover the position in a rally. My hedges mirror stat-vol as well, but are a bit more complex. Never trade more than 50d against the primary position.
Buying(selling) futures and selling the atm straddle can be a good directional strategy as well. In this case I would sell the 690 straddle and sell futures, 1:1. To follow-up: A rally to 690 on ER2 is a robust stop-loss on the straddle/futures position... you're likely going to have some straddle-gains to mitigate the loss on futures.
I don't front the cost, thankfully. The dbase is unbelievable, launchpad is awesome and the vol-tools are decent.