Monday 14 January 2008

Taking off the FTSE Option trade

Back on December 21st, with the FTSE trading at 6424, I sold a 6200 Call and bought a 6200 Put, and for zero-cost was able to buy 6 times the size on the Put versus the Call. The FTSE just now is trading ~6230.

I'd sold the Call for 303.7 points, I just bought it back for 87.6 points. Profit $2,115.
I'd bought the Put for 52.7 and just sold it for 47.1, for a loss of $329.

Overall on the trade, I made $1,786.


3 Month FTSE Chart



I'm pretty gutted with this one, as on Friday when the FTSE was well under 6200 it was showing a profit of closer to $6,000...I had an itchy trigger-finger but just never pulled it...too greedy, in hindsight. Now with expiry on Friday coming up, I'm not sure I could stand the time decay of the Put, plus with the markets having taken such a hit in the last couple of weeks, perhaps we see a little short-term stability. So I'll take my meagre profit and move on.


Yours,
2and20

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"A gain is always better than a loss..." (Monsieur De La Palisse). Time decay for such short-lived options is terrific… why don’t you limit your trades to the selling leg?

By the way, the attached spreadsheet reports a wrong closing date for the above trade (February, 1st, 2008), as long as a wrong expiry date for the put leg (FTSE 6200 Feb Put). The closing dates reported for £ Jan 4, 2.00 Straddle and the GBPAUD Jun '08 are wrong as well (January 4, 2007 and January 9, 2007). Not a great problem, anyway…

Still willing to go on with that Eurodollar trade?

Greetings from (today rainy) Italy, AT

2and20 said...

thanks for pointing that out! have corrected date on FTSE closing, the other dates were correct, just in american date format. i've changed the format to make it more readable.

yeah the FTSE trade has really annoyed me, especially with today's fall. trying to think about what i did wrong, i should probably have taken my money on Friday. i just felt equities had had a lot of bad news, and might be ready for a grind higher. I'm usually pretty good at counter-trading the market, in that I sell on days when it's up strong and buy when everyone else is selling. Maybe that was the problem on this trade, in that I covered while the market was up. Oh well.

Eurodollar is certainly hurting! I think it's a little aggressively priced here, and don't plan to cover it. I might sell a bit more even up here. It would take about 200bps of rate cuts by September to start hurting me, and whilst this is certainly possible, I think at some point we'll see a change of sentiment and all those cuts will get priced out.

Anonymous said...

Your spreadsheet is quite easy to read... but we're in 2008, and not in 2007 - "£ Jan 4, 2.00 Straddle" closing date is still January 4, 2007 and "GBPAUD Jun '08" is January 9, 2007. Anyway, I'm not such a meticulous person in every-day life...

Gee, you actually trade a lot! It's not that easy to keep track with your trades...

AT

Anonymous said...

By the way, why don't you make a printable version of your spreadsheet?

AT

2and20 said...

ah! thanks for pointing that out. i'm quite picky about getting all the details right...

re: printable spreadsheet, hadn't thought about that, see what you mean. i'll need to think about that one for a while to see how to get that to work.

and yeah i'm trading more than ever at the moment, i guess cos there is so much opportunity in the markets just now...when it's quiet i can happily do nothing for ages.