He did buy the bull spread...then offset some of the cost by selling a credit spread......THAT'S a fly...
I don't think you speak for "most traders" so let's just go with you speaking for yourself. You may buy an OTM fly because you expect it to hit your chosen "center", but the butterfly strategy itself was devised to profit from a stock that is not trending one way or the other. The whole idea of trying to "guess" where a trending stock might land is just a bad use of options...but if you're into losing money go right ahead. It's also not a binary...but w/e...
Oh, I thought he bought a long call...then he liked 1 call so much be bought 1 more and ended up in the "2 Long 2 Call" position. After which he decided it needs more work, so he sold a call and now he has the 2 up 1 down which he finally converted into a fly by selling yet another call. Somewhere in that mix he also bought a bull spread, except that he didn't...let's make more pointless comments.
There is no such thing as "placement of a position", you are making up stuff. My example was to illustrate that you can have flys that are highly directional positions. But of course there is. It is a proper distributional bet where you are buying the part of distribution you see as more probable and sell the parts of the distribution that you see as overpriced. You could think of a fly as a combination of two wide european digitals - you can be long both (if you are pinning the forward) but also you can be long one and short the other, which makes it a directional trade.
I give up...Safilo you obviously don't trade for a living.....I'm done wasting my time. I did have one more contribution to the fly discussion however. I listen to Tom and Tony on tastytrade occasionally and in one of their market measures they have done some study on when the IV is above the 50% (of its average IV) doing what "they" call Big dog or Big Boy b-flys and closing them at 25% profit is like almost 100% winning strat. Most of the time its earnings plays. They think they have found the "holy grail"...I kinda lol'd a bit because that is exactly what Riskattypru has been doing for years with pretty good success. Yes they lost big on GOOG as did many others but over all success rate has been pretty dam good.
This safilo idiot is alluding that the fly should only be traded neutral as that's his interpretation with his limited knowledge. Purely as a bet on distribution centered on the forward. Swapping realized for implied. He won't know wtf I am talking about, but that's it. A long fly (natural) can be short or nominally long gamma if OTM. The fly wasn't "devised" as it's simply a straddle-strangle combo. The error of "positioning" is a result of being wrong on vola (don't trade the fly), direction (deltas), or distribution (flip modality). sle's digital analogy is excellent as the payout on the vertical is embedded in the payout of the digital. A 30/100 otm digital is a $3 ten-wide vanilla call spread. If the otm digital is at risk then you were wrong on the distribution and another position would've been more appropriate. It doesn't mean you shouldn't trade flies directionally, to the contrary. A neutral fly is the most costly and neutrality doesn't exist.
You mean they pin the current level when the vol is really high? Duh... how do they pick the wing strikes?