I've been thinking about the dangers of shorting long-dated options. These options cost more mostly due to their additional time value. Recall an option’s value = intrinsic value + time-value, therefore options with more time left will cost more.
Below are put prices for Oct-2020/11k vs. March-2021/11k. Despite both being OTM, March costs ~3x more than Oct. This is because the March option has 177 days vs. Oct only having 30 days left. March allows us to have optionality for 147 more days which is reflected in its price.
It can be tempting to short these longer-dated options given their higher premium. If all goes to plan and these options expire OTM, then there is a nice premium which can be collected (or as the saying goes these days - we can "harvest" these premiums).
One key thing about longer dated options is they are much more sensitive to changes in implied vol (larger vega) relative to shorter maturities. If #BTC IV were to jump higher for any reason, shorting these longer dated options could be disastrous.
On the flip-side, if you think IV will go up, then you can use a ratio like vega/theta to assess which option will give you the best “bang for buck”.
In that case, we want to maximize vega and minimize theta. Vega is how much our option value changes for a small change in IV. Theta is how much time decay we incur on a daily basis. What we want here is to pay less in theta to bet on higher volatility.
Vega/theta ratios get progressively higher as we move to longer maturities near ATM. If the goal is to bet on higher IV, these longer maturities may offer the best value. Conversely, these maturities also represent the greatest risk in shorting based on an IV perspective.
Note: the scale on the y-axis is normalized to make this plot easier to visualize. Also, for easier interpretation, here we used the absolute value of the vega/theta ratio as theta is negative when buying options.
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1. As one of the youngest and largest option liquidity providers in the market, the team at @Arbelosxyz is continually exploring efficient ways to trade volatility. A few days ago @joshua_j_lim shared a trade idea which profited from collapsing vols amidst choppy price action. This week, we'll evaluate various systematic volatility selling strategies in crypto. Full piece here: arbelos.xyz/quantitive-fra…
2. As a baseline, we can evaluate the P&L of selling weekly BTC delta-hedged straddles on @DeribitExchange. Overall the performance is not bad despite some steep drawdowns in 2020 / 2021.
3. In theory, it makes sense to sell vol when ATM IV trades at a rich premium to RV, quantified using the "VRP" ratio (ATM IV / RV). In our feature exploration, sorting the vanilla straddle P&L by this ratio shows a rapid cumulative P&L increase as the VRP crosses 1.00. This suggests that most of the strategy's P&L accrues when IV > RV.
1. Thrilled to see that @Arbelosxyz is now public! I've had the privilege of collaborating with the team to conduct in-depth research in the crypto derivatives space, with one of our first pieces on analyzing yield strats on @pendle_fi. Dive into our findings here: arbelos.xyz/getting-to-kno…
2. DeFi interest rate markets face two primary challenges:
a) Absence of fixed maturity products
b) High volatility of interest rates
Both of these limitations make it difficult to justify allocating large sums of capital to DeFi interest rate markets. As a result, this is where Pendle as a protocol shines which allows considerable flexibility on how to trade yield.
3. Key components in Pendle's protocol include:
- PT: Principal Token
- YT: Yield Token
- PT + YT = the total value of the underlying asset.
2. Not investment advice - just for fun / educational purposes.
3. Over the past few months there's been a steady rise in 0DTE options trading in SPX. These are super short-dated and there’s a lot of gamma associated with these options. Nearly 40% of SPX option volume was 0DTE in Q2 2022 - this has raised concerns from JPM researchers.
1. Over the past few day's we've noticed some massive trades on @DeribitExchange. Surprisingly some of these trades were executed against limit orders without using RFQs. This gave inspiration to build an order-book scanner which is now open-sourced: github.com/schepal/deribi…
2. The motivation for this whole project was due to some large whale deciding to trade 25k contracts of ETH-30JUN23-400-P on Jan 5/23. Digging into the details we can see this trader decided to sell these options against passive limit orders on Deribit.
3. It's interesting b/c this trader could have gotten much better execution by tapping an OTC desk or @tradeparadigm's RFQ platform. A possible reason is this trader wanted to be completely anon and not attract attention until after the trade was completed (h/t @VidiellaLaura)
1. A few weeks ago we witnessed a duel between @stablekwon and @AlgodTrading in a public wager on LUNA's future price action. In this piece written with @tradeparadigm we analyze how this bet could be priced using options pricing theory + who got rugged on this trade…
1. Over the past few months, DeFi ecosystems have witnessed a surge in structured product platforms - notably option vaults. While the current yields on these vaults can be enticing, we take a closer look at the long-run performance of these strategies: research.ledgerprime.com/p/a-quantitati…
2. Let’s start with a brief overview of the DeFi options space - TVL in 2020 was virtually non-existent but blew up to nearly $1B at the start of 2022. This was primarily due to the surge of activity within the DeFi structured products space. Data Source: @DefiLlama
3. Most of these structured products revolve around covered call options. As a refresher, this strategy involves being long the underlying spot asset and selling a call. This effectively caps the upside price action in exchange for an option premium.