I know one trader who purports a 95% win rate by SELLING straddles on the weeklies. I think he is using options on the index ETFs.
I personally prefer to sell straddles based on IV and analysis of the underlying but not saying it is better or worse, just easier for me to find good opportunities. I often prefer butterflies now to short straddles to control risk/margin. Easier to set and forget a Fly than a short straddle when I am not in front of trading screen all day.
Anything less than 95% would be problematic, those 5% losing trades takes a big chunk out of the 95% winning trades. He is just one bad trade away from wiping out all his remaining profits.
One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was trying to find strategies that worked all the time. It has literally taken me years to get over this way of thinking. I think I definitely am guilty of succumbing to a "framing bias" -- meaning I want to take something as complex as the option market and reduce it to a simple story with a simple trade. This type of reductionism proved to be a fool's errand for me. I've now trained myself to view the market as efficient on average....but the variation and uncertainty in the market is my friend. IV's pop around, the market moves....I think most of the time, options "vibrate" in a range between cheap/expensive with fair value in the middle. Realized vol is lumpy. Day 1......18%....Day 2....4%......Day 3....7%....and so on. Because of this, a straddle could be cheap Monday morning, but rich Tuesday afternoon. If I let the market ebb and flow as it will and I refine my analytical methods to be conditional on what I see in the market at the moment (as opposed to selling a straddle at 2:55 pm every Friday), I think I have a greater chance of success.
Trading options with a univariate off and on switch would be more efficiently expressed by trading the underlying. However, there are microstucture games one can play if one has access. At the end of the day, it's where you make money that counts. Unless of course, your job is too run an institutional book. One should really be looking to trade the vol surface to optimize an exposure or trade several assets with a dispersion framework. Come to think of it. I really don't know what I am doing.
Agreed. The same can be said about selling options ahead of earnings. You can't buy or sell options without taking some view on volatility. And a high IV number doesn't mean rich just as much as a low IV number doesn't mean low