Unintentional Butterfly Spreads

It is important to decompose your position especially when it gets complicated after a lot of trading.  Here Mark Wolfinger extracts butterflies from his portfolio to reduce the risk and make a profit.


Butterflies are a very popular option trading strategy among  individual investors.  I seldom trade butterflies, but because of my style, I often find that I own flys (a convenient abbreviation).  The question arises: How can I take advantage of owning those unintentional butterflys, or should I pretend they are not part of my account?

A butterfly is a spread with three legs.  All three are calls, or all three are puts, and each expires at the same time.  A call butterfly combines the purchase of a bull spread with the sale of a bear spread of equal width [If the bull spread is 5-points wide, then so is the bear spread], with the proviso that the option sold in each spread is identical.

The ratio for a butterfly is: long one; short two; long one.

Here’s a butterfly spread that I held last week:

Long  12 RUT Jun 540 calls
Short 24 RUT Jun 550 calls
Long  12 RUT Jun 560 calls

Note this position is

Long  12 RUT Jun 540/550 call spreads
Short 12 RUT Jun 550/560 call spreads

There are other types of butterfly spreads, including iron butterflies and broken-wing butterflies.  Perhaps that’s a good topic for another post.

Unintentional?  How can I own an unintentional position?

I trade iron condors most of the time.  Last week I was still holding onto some June positions, against my better judgment. [But this time I got lucky and earned a good profit.  More often than not, I find holding these risky positions results in further losses.]

I had two June call spreads remaining, having recently covered the put spread portion of the iron condors at low prices.  I was short the Jun 530/540 call spread and the Jun 550/560 call spread.  Here is a list of my positions (but not using the correct quantities):

Embedded in those two call spreads are two butterflys.

I was long 12 RUT Jun 540/550/560 call butterflys (12×24x12)

I was also short 12 RUT Jun 530/540/550 butterflys.

I refer to these positions as unintentional butterflies because I did not originate the positions as flies, but as individual call spreads.  Nevertheless, those butterflies were in my portfolio.

If RUT were to rally to 550, the butterfly spread would be a winner.  But that’s not the way to evaluate risk because the 530/540 spread would lose the maximum possible amount, and my six extra calls would only help (up to 550) on a continued rally.

Above 550, I’d be facing immediate danger from the 550/560 spread.  Six extra longs don’t go very far when protecting a short position of 25 spreads.

NOTE:  Looking at values when expiration arrives, at 550, the six extra calls would be worth $1,000 apiece.  Because I was short 25 Jun 550 calls (and still long six 540s), for each point above 550, I’d lose $1,900 – up to a maximum of $19,000.  After 560 the losses stop and my six extra calls would produce $600 per point.  But this is a very risky position when RUT is trading that high.  the position was bad enough at 530, but I did not want to face that trouble if we rallied far above 550.

Thus, I sold my call butterfly spreads.  My rationale was that it reduced risk if we rapidly rose above 550 (yes, I understand if that happened I could sell the fly at a better price as the index approached 550), and would provide extra profits if RUT ended its rally and headed lower.  The point of this story is that I had a butterfly embedded in my position and made a trade it when I thought the price was good enough ($1.30).

The position looked strange after the trade, but was still easy to manage.  As it turned out this time, the market receded and the June positions were readily closed.

Position after butterfly sale:

When you own flies, the best result occurs when expiration arrives and the underlying asset is very near the middle strike.  Then the bull spread (you bought) is worth near its maximum value and the put spread (you sold) is worthless (or worth very little).

Thus, holding has benefits.  The spread can continue to increase in value.

But, holding is risky because if the market moves and the three options are out of the money (or in the money) at expiration, then the fly is worthless.  Thus, it’s best to sell a fly at some point.  But choosing that point is a difficult proposition.  I’m sure some fly traders have their individual guidelines, but I was pleased to collect that $1.30 with a week and a half remaining before the options expired – and especially when all the options were OTM at the time I sold the fly.

If you have
more than one iron condor position for any given expiration month,
take a look the possibility (don’t jump in without a good understanding of how to handle the residual position) of trading those embedded flys for additional
profit opportunities.