XJO (ASX) What are my Options?

Originally posted by Zonetrader ↑

Hi Semage,

The problem with setting butterflies initially close to the money is that they are the most expensive and there is a chance that the market will move away from that point.

Rising IV doesn't help the butterfly as it's working against any time decay and you are correct that maximum profit can only be possible at expiry and if the underlying expires at exactly 5300. I still find they are a low risk trade to potentially make some profit and I rarely expect to get maximum profit from them and they are not the only strategy I use. It really does take experience in understanding how these trades work and when/where to put them on.

Have you plotted your butterfly such as the free version of Hoadley's OSET? I like it because it has a button where you can cycle the trade to expiry and it shows where it makes and loses money. It also has a time and volatility button which shows various coloured lines showing how the trade will perform at different time intervals until expiry and a means of increasing and decreasing volatility to get a good visual picture of what can happen with the trade. I only have the free version now and all these are available. It does require manually adding the data as I think the data imports are part of the paid version. The other thing it is an excel add-on so it won't work with open office - at least I've had no luck with that one.

How to manage the trade from here would depend on whether you want to lock in a little profit now or hold it and see if the market comes back up around this area before expiry. That means risking the initial 11 points you have paid to make a potentially larger profit than the 16 or so points you can get now. How to manage the trade should be planned as much as possible in advance before putting on the trade as emotions can cloud our judgement once the trade is in progress...

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Hi Zonetrader. You never did start that thread on Options!. If everyone I'm about to bore on Options could just skip this post ,I have a query I was hoping Zonetrader could comment on.

I've been p pouring over educational material the past few weeks tying to get educated in selling option premium. Some of the resources you recommended here have been great. The Tastytrade website is brilliant. I've subscribed to impliedvolatility.com.au. I'll get Hoadley's in due course.

I decided to do some simple vertical spreads as a starting point but can't find anything with reasonable risk/ reward on the ASX_for Bull Put Spreads I thought that the reasonable metric was to sell credits about 1/3 the width of the spread. But even on high IV stocks I'm finding pricing is about 10-15% the width. So making maybe 10 to 15 cents on a $1 wide spread doesn't seem worth it. And that's Put spreads. Forget about Call credit Spreads, they are even more tightly priced.

I thought selling options would be a viable strategy but I'm getting a bit discouraged.

Is it a feature of the asx market that pricing is poor? Do I just have to look harder for trades? Or do people just trade on these low margins and rely on a high win rate to make it profitable?

Would appreciate your thoughts as to how viable option credit spreads are on our market.