The fly isn't sentient. It's the structure with the x-sectional edge at inception. IOW you don't want to necessarily buy OTM bull verts if vol and skew are high unless the cs is lesser of evils.
The corridor fly RR trade had a +exp bc of the fly bump (with symmetric-tail figures). There are a lot of moving parts. Beta skew, vol-regime, microstructure, etc.
OTM index puts trade over calls. ATM/OTM index cs trade over ATM/OTM (=) ps. call as revenue side (px is higher, duh). fwd -> cs -> ps
Synthetic/fwd determines strike selection. Equidistant strikes up/down. cs/ps =1.18 (1.2). It's not normed to decile and I am not giving you that. This is 101 seminar info for punters. There are figures in each index market where a RR-figure will result in a pure arb-condition, regardless of decile. The higher the figure correlates to a reduction in haircut under PM. You would think that a 30-line on SPX would result in a larger req, but my skew-arb is adding BP due to a favorable second-moment.
Retail option trading is mostly a type of online performative mathematical theater by obvious bullshitters and delusional people. The actors lines in this play are to try to convince you they have have this generative Bayesian model of the markets they are sampling from that prints money. You should just automatically put anyone on ignore on here that mentions Hull or Baird. It is the most obvious of tells that a person is completely full of shit. Just a form of a stochastic parrot repeating things that were said a million times on the old Nuclear Phyance board by actual institutional quants.
Well they used to trade options on the floor so I doubt people were doing the calculus in their heads...or utilizing the Greeks like they do today... But it's definitely all about the math...probably just had
Of course it is all about "the math" but "the math" is a spectrum that on one end of the spectrum you have rigorous mathematical proof on the other end you have a type of performance art using numbers and the language of mathematics. Retail option trading is almost entirely of the performance art kind. I would imagine a lot of professional option trading is also for marketing purposes. That is one thing I give credit to the YOLO reddit options traders is at least they are honest with themselves about what they are doing.
Why do you isolate options in your reasoning? It could be an opinion on financial trading as a whole. Options are just an alternative tool that offer a multi dimensional approach. Even if you are not a complex vol expert, you can use them to play both side of direction, no side, or use them as an insurance, or as "no-stop loss tool (for a premium) on directional chart trading", or use them in a binary mode to bet on price by x time... And you can take any side of all these combinations, debit or credit these premiums.