Recent content by hedgex

I have strong bearish sentiment on many eft's and would like to choose a strategy between shorting the stocks or buying puts. The issues with put buying are twofold: 1. The volatility, therefore the premium, is unusually high. Right now the VIX is 35. Options look expensive, more so with...

Ditto. The Risk Navigator is too crappy to be useful -- it is more like a teaser. The exposure calculation for far out options gives far-out over-estimates. The P&L chart for a complex option portfolio is almost meaningless if you have SPX and SDS. A what-if should let me vary IV on a group of...

It is bad that I had to do this but IB keeps the workings of portfolio margin 'proprietary'. I can't find anything useful in the documentation and the reps are trained not to tell. The first bad thing is that the margin can change fast. One evening I saw 20% excess liquidity. The next morning...

Let's say that the strangle has a bearish bias that is I was after, betting on a decline, but not sure about the timing and afraid of the fluctuation in the mean time.

I sold a bunch of strangles and am concerned that the volatility may surge. I want to use VIX to hedge against a sudden vol change. I found the vegas of my options are -0.01. With total 50 contracts, I figure the total vega is -0.01*100*50=-50. My options have high IV than SPX, let's say...

ETFs may distribute dividends and capital gains, which should lower the share prices. Because the option holder receives none of those, when that happens, the value of calls should drops and that of puts should rise. So would selling calls and buying puts before the ex-date be profitable?

When my short call became ITM on expiry day, I thought I would buy to close the position. But the ask price price was 1% over the intrinsic value. I figure it would cost less if I just buy the stock to neutralize the assignment. Is this generally true? With spreads, if both legs are ITM or...

I figure IB has a list of high-risk stocks on which the margin is 50-100% of the underlying value, regardless of how far OTM the short call is.

They are crazy, well, dumb, in another way. As my PM margin soared in the day, I tried to close some positions. To my surprise, a $50 trade (10x5c short call contracts ) brought down the margin by $20000. Those contract were 6 days to expiry. I guess they just wanted to force me to buy back...

Did you consider rolling back to RegT margin? At least it is predictable.