It was common to have that strategy. The specialist in front of me once told me, "If I sell an option at 1/16 (yes, a long a time ago) and it goes to $1.00 and expires worthless, it was a good trade". That worked better in the 70s, 80's and 90's when options were typical over priced, as most customers bought options. With new margin rules from clearing firms today, not sure if you can still do that and option prices are more efficient now.
picking up pennies in front of a steam roller or risking your house to gain a bicycle gain by an inordinate amount of risk - embrace the risk someone had to sell those flex options to the banks for the weekend...
Stan Finney had less than $20MM of OPM under management. Give me a fcking break. I know a dozen independents bigger than him that only trade their own money. "World's largest options trader" lol.
His AUM via Rainbow was public. His accounts were trivial and all on the CTA side. Walmart lulz. He closed the BD three years before he died and Rainbow was the CTA that had couch monies.
could you have made billions selling options then? there wasn’t that much Vega notional to trade especially if you did it as a buy side and margin was less forgiving. I’m not sure you can do it now and there’s billions of Vega notional in liquidity today. The only billionaires trading options either are market makers who are picking off the flow on all that Vega that’s trading hands.
you have looked into what might have been in the pocket of a billionaire option trader. it would be like me making assumptions of you being a crack head from what i see you post.
Many thanks for clarifying matters. I hadn't though about this possibility, but it makes a lot of sense. Thanks also for providing a script to interrogate your database. I have only one question about it. For the sake of saving downloaded data, woudl it be possible to prefilter for the 'publisher_id' 39, whithout doing it as post-processing? Thanks again for your help and assistance.
Thanks for asking and yes that is a requested feature here. We don't have immediate plans to develop it but will probably do so if we see more interest in it. I'll forward your feedback to the product team.
His performance was public and AUM was reported as a CTA. So you're implying that he was operating the Walton's FO as some off the books POA. Yeah, nah. You're FOS as usual. Bently.