My tuition costs have gone up.
Today I lost money.
The pain of it is that I was pretty sure that the trade was good.
Here is what happened. I bought the 7.50 April straddle for Alcoa Aluminum yesterday and I sold the July 7.50 straddle. The idea was as explained in earnings trades, that the drop in implied volatility would make the trade profitable today.
What happened was that the April volatility dropped alright but the July options volatility held up. Look at the table below:
| AA stock $8 | 4/7 price | IV | 4/8 price | IV |
| April 7.5 C | 0.71 | 118% | 0.7 / 0.75 | 86% |
| April 7.5 P | 0.565 | 116% | 0.23 / 0.26 | 82% |
| July 7.5 C | 1.52 | 98% | 1.65 / 1.73 | 97% |
| July 7.5 P | 1.37 | 90% | 1.17 / 1.23 | 88% |
What I didn’t tell you is that I put on the same trade with MOS and FDO. So I really got hammered. What this tells me is that the front month volatility collapses but not the far month. Look at MOS, Mosaic Corp a chemical company that also announced earnings last night.
| MOS 42.43 | 4/7 price | IV | 4/8 price | IV | |
| April 45 C | 2.2 | 94% | 0.75 / 0.85 | 67% | |
| April 40 P | 1.45 | 100% | 1.0 / 1.1 | 72% | |
| July 45 C | 5.4 | 80% | 4.3 / 4.6 | 75% | |
| July 40 P | 4.51 | 83% | 4.7 / 4.8 | 79% |
So what we really want to do is sell the near month and buy the far month to take advantage of the volatility collapse. What about a large movement in the stock? How do we protect against that?
To be continued….
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.