In the previous article, we discussed what makes an option valuable. At its core, an option is about choice—the choice to buy or sell an asset at a specific price within a set timeframe. In this article, we’ll explore exactly what this means. An option gives the holder the right, but not the obligation, to …
Financial options contracts are really just options. That is, they give us a choice or an option to do something. We’ll go through a simple example of why options are valuable. Let’s say I offer you the option to use my truck. What might the value of this option be to you? Is it Intrinsically Valuable? Maybe you need …
In much of life, success results from doing what other people expect you to be doing. You get top marks in an exam by answering the way the marker expects you to. Rising up the corporate ladder has as much to do with “being seen to do the right thing” as it has to do …
Back in May 2020, in the eye of the Covid storm, we looked at overnight vs intraday returns in US equities. Intuitively, we’d probably expect to see higher average returns overnight when the market is closed – because it’s much more difficult to hedge and manage our exposures when the cash market is closed, so …
Industry veterans sometimes remark that successful gamblers tend to make good traders, and engineers tend to make lousy traders. This is a gross generalisation, of course, but one reason is that trading, at the most fundamental level, is a game of pricing uncertain outcomes. This requires probabilistic thinking, and engineers tend to be trained to …
The first thing you need as a trader is a clear edge. What do I mean by “edge?” Edge comes from a market inefficiency that means you can buy cheap and sell rich on average over the long run. Said differently, edge is positive expected value. Expected value is the return you expect to realise …
A few years ago, I got deep into the idea of constructing a long/short equity options portfolio based on the kind of simple factor sorts that had been so successful in quant equity. My original intention was to set up an index and license it to fund managers. Of course, there are many reasons why …
If you trade liquid stocks or futures contracts, the first thing you will notice about equity options trading is that the contracts are illiquid and the bid/ask spread is wide. This sucks, but it makes perfect sense. There is only one AAPL stock to trade, but there are a ton of different options contracts trading …
Last week, we looked at simple data analysis techniques to test for persistence. But we only looked at a feature that is measured over a single day – the absolute range. Such a feature makes it easy to test persistence because you don’t have the problem of overlapping data. Each data point is entirely self-contained …
An assumption we often make in trading research is that the future will be at least a little like the past. I see a lot of beginners making this assumption implicitly without recognising that they’re making it or thinking about whether it’s reasonable to do so. That’s a mistake. If you are making this assumption, …
