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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

A summary of Karen, the super trader's option selling strategy in 2013

More than one year ago, I was intrigued by the Interviews on Karen, the supertrader and posted an outline of her strategy discussed in the video. Since then, there were many reader comments. So I studied the portfolio margin that she used to achieve high return on margin, and wrote a few other posts related to the strategy. Besides, I also started working on back-testing Karen's strategy and set up a Karen Study Group.

On Feb 11, 2014, Karen was interviewed by Tasty Trade again to provide an update of her trading in 2013 and some of her general trading guidelines. Here, I'd like to share my understanding from the interview on this naked option selling strategy. Please note Karen will adapt her strategy according to market conditions such as the volatility VIX. She highly recommended traders to come up with strategies that work for themselves.


2013 Fund Performances & Goal
  • Two funds totaling 196 Million USD, yearly return after expense
    • 27%, 24% (over 50M USD profits)
  • No losing month on 2013 (13 straight months, incl. Jan 2014)
    • Close out every month. No rolling out to the next month, closed current month positions.
  • Goal
    • At least to beat SPX gains yearly (but there were no specifics discussed on what rules were used to ensure beating SPX)

Strategy of Selling Naked Options
  • A strategy to profit on Theta (time decay) and volatility
  • Rules may be changed depending on market trend and volatility
  • Sell calls or puts independently
    • Never sell options as spreads (i.e. strangles)
  • Sell more puts depending on market trends
    • In 2013, maxed out on the put side to sell twice as many puts as calls
  • Sell calls with greater risks as market does not crash up
    • In 2013, stayed light on call side to sell calls with shorter period of time
  • The variable ratio of put to call contract sizes allows the strategy to adapt to market trend
    • In 2013, the 2 to 1 put to call ratio kept the portfolio Delta from negative
    • Most premium selling option portfolio have negative Delta (but not Karen's)

Trading Vehicles
  • Traded SPX options mainly, used options of SPX e-mini futures /ES sometimes
  • Main reason not trading SPY is commission costs, plus tax advantage 1256.
  • No problems with SPX option liquidity
  • Can potentially go to RUT if need other positions to put on
  • Disciplined to avoid trading individual stocks even though they have high volatility

Option Strike Price Selection

Sell far out-of-the-money, high probability options depending on market volatility
  • In 2011 & 2012 when volatility was higher (VIX >= 15), sold puts with 2 SD (5% ITM Probability)
  • In 2013 when volatility was low (VIX around 11 to 13), sold puts with 1 SD (15% ITM Probability) to 1.5 SD (7% ITM Probability)
  • Sell calls with 10% ITM probability

Option Cycle Selection
  • 14 days to expiration for calls in general for 2013
  • 56 days to expiration for calls if price can be projected and good premium can be obtained from far above the projected price
    • Use trend analysis including 2 SD Bollinger bands, resistance, and FIB retracements
  • 56 days to expiration for puts

Trade Entry (Always legging in trades)
  • Sell calls when market rises
  • Sell puts when market falls
    • In 2013, sold more puts when VIX jumped
  • Trades are entered in multiple days around predetermined option expiration days

Trade Exits
  • Actively take profits and risks off the table
  • For options (puts) starting around 56 DTE
    • Close positions if profits reach 50% within 1st 16 days
    • Leave positions on after the 40 DTE neighborhood if they are not closed yet so that they can expire worthless
  • For options (calls) starting around 14 days
    • Close positions if profits reach 20% to 30% or even better 50% in a few days
    • If price continues to rise with 1 week left for call options, then take the calls away and move them to next week while keeping puts on
  • After some point of time, may stop pulling back profits since a built-in profit is realized already.
    • Leave remaining positions of current month alone and start working on next month.

Trade Adjustments
  • When ITM probability is less than 30%, no adjustment is required.
  • When price drops and ITM prob becomes 30% (an arbitrary number) or greater for puts with plenty of days left (> 30 day)
    • Adjust the position by taking it off and sell other far OTM puts about 20% ITM prob cautiously
      • Some puts may be sold 10 points lower in ITM proba and others sold 15 points lower in ITM prob
    • It may be pushed out to another week for puts (Not another month)
      • Try to fix it in current week if possible
    • It may lose one or a few dollars
      • Try to make up the loss either through selling more put or call contracts
    • Will keep existing calls as their value decrease and let them expire worthless
    • Do not use existing calls as adjustments to the losses on the puts
      • It avoids risks due to sudden market direction reversals
  • Don’t have any option ITM!

Money and Risk Management
  • The most important part of the trading game
  • Use portfolio margin and further stress test potential loses
  • Unlimited risk in theory
  • Use TOS Analyzer Tab for risk evaluations
    • The daily portfolio P&L numbers derived at 10% up and 12% down of the market price must not exceed net liquidation value in normal cases
    • Portfolio P&L losses at the crash price must not exceed net liq
      • In 2013, crash price = (current price – 100) x 88%
        • The extra cushion is added due to low volatility (11, 12 to 14)
      • In 2011, crash price = (current price – 200) x 88%
        • The less cushion due to higher volatility
    • Managing risk at this crash point assuming the portfolio had a major loss already
  • If net liq drops due to adverse market conditions, the unrealized positions are losing money but they are considered safe if they have not reached adjustment points
  • In worst cases, may buy some low valued puts or calls to offset the push from market move
    • But this is not very often
    • Don’t care or fear as long as the positions are safe
    • Do not over-manage positions

Psychology and Mindset
  • Control the emotions of both fear and greed
  • Trust statistics and high probability (Use 2 SD for 95% odds of success)
  • Use structured method and manage positions well
  • Require a high level of confidence and repeatable successes for a long time.

Team Members
  • 7 members: 6 traders and 1 controller
  • Encourage other traders to set up of trading team for additional ideas


Monday, February 24, 2014

FXI Position Adjusted


In about 1 week after I sold FXI Feb$36.5 puts, FXI seemed to start a down trend which lasted over 1 month to now. Based on the Chart of FXI, it appears to have another leg of rolling down again. So I decided to reduce my assigned FXI position by selling 25% shares to reduce the risk. For the remaining long FXI ETF positions, I sold Apri$37 calls to collect $0.61 credit per contract. If FXI does not fall too much in the next couple of months or so, my position will be OK. Otherwise, I will continue to roll down my short calls when 80% of profit is reached for this long term position.



Created with ProphetCharts®

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Initiated MarQ$180/183 bear call spreads on SPY

Market has dropped significantly in the last couple of weeks with a large number of distribution days. So my near term outlook is bearish for the market. The SPY is around $175.20 right now. I felt it was not a good time to buy straight puts since SPY already dropped below major support level around $177.5. As VIX reached 19.60 which was close to the high of last 6 months, I decided to sell a few bear call spreads.

I played with the March Quarterly $180/182, $180/183 & $180/184 in the TOS analyzer and found the 1st two spreads had similar return on margin around 30% while the last spread had a ROM of 27%. So I sold MarchQ $180/183 bear call spreads with a credit of $0.87. The Delta of short strike $180 was around 0.3.

According to the analyzer, the ITM probability of the short strike one month later is 26% and at March 31 is about 33%. I'll treat this trade as a directional trade with some wiggle rooms. If 80% of profit is reached, I'll close the trade. If the trade lasts 30 days, I'll review it and try to close it. In case the market starts to rebound, I may close the trade when SPY reaches $181 area.


Saturday, February 1, 2014

Estimating In-The-Money Probability using IV and Standard Deviation

I've studied stock (and VIX)'s implied volatility changes with time before. It was based on the book by Dan Passarelli: Trading Option Greeks. This is a great book about Option Greeks and volatility. My post on the Effect of Prices, Time, Volatility on Option Greeks was also based on this book. It's these types of studies that lead me to the understanding of estimation of ITM probability of stocks.


Recently, I also researched for methods to calculate the ITM probability of options since the supertrader Karen uses it in her naked option selling strategy. If we find a formula to estimate the ITM probability, we can implement it in ThinkScript in our backtests of the supertrader's strategy.

ITM Probability Estimation Using Standard Deviation

Due to lack of ITM probability data in ThinkScript, the ITM probability can be estimated using the standard deviation of a normal distribution as shown below, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation.


ITM Probability
SD Multiples
0.27%
3
4.55%
2
5%
1.960  
10%
1.645  
20%
1.282
30%
1.050  
31.73%
1

Stock Price Strikes/Points for Corresponding ITM Probability

In a recent TastyTrade video, the relationship between stock price changes and SD, IV, expiration days is presented in a formula:
Stock Price Change Percentage = SD Multiple x IV / Square Root of (365/DTE).

Putting all the pieces of the above information together, we should be able to estimate the stock prices for any ITM probability:
Stock Price of a certain ITM Probability = Current Price x ( 1 + Stock Price Change Percentage)

It means we can calculate the call/put selling strikes and adjustment points using the above formula for Karen's strategy. Since all of these parameters are available in TOS software, it's possible for us to implement in TS. I'll update it once I get a chance to code it. We should be able to present these prices in stock price charts to provide good visual display as well.

Update

Based on Vince's comment below, I have updated the above table which included probability on both sides. For the strategy of selling naked options, the single sided probability should be used. Therefore, the following table is the right one.
ITM Probability
SD Multiples
0.13%  
3
2.28% 
2
2.50% 
1.960
5%      
1.645   (Sold put strike) 
10%    
1.282   (Sold call strike)
15%    
1.050
15.87% 
1
30%
0.52     (Adjustment point)
Vince also kindly shared the following web site that gives us the SD multiple (Z) in a graphical representation: http://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution-table.html. In this dynamic graph, you can select "Up to Z" button at top left side first, and move curve to a probability value of interests, then read the SD multiple (Z).