Famous option traders

Quote from atticus:

+1

He'd be a multiple Nobel laureate were he an academic.

Nobel prizes are given only to socialists by a committee of communists. Ed would never have a chance.:D
 
Hull, Yass and Ritchie are probably better-known for developing the infrastructure than any individual trading prowess. All of them got their start when the straddle in the 30y was a $1,000 wide.
 
Quote from marketsurfer:

Is that why Milton Friedman won one in 1976?

I'm not big on backtesting or historical data, but that seems like an outlier (if true).:D
 
I know of a guy, can't recall his name. He worked for Phillip Brothers in the silver desk when I was wet behind the ears.

At one point in time he was heavily short spot due to a bunch of client orders, and there was no way to cover in the futures or cash market without adversely moving the price a lot. Options were expiring in 3 days and he started to buy all the out of the money calls he could for the minimum tick for more than he was short.

He then exercised them all at exactly the last possible moment.(nearly all the options were out of the money and were to expire worthless).

Silver had a melt up of several dollars that appeared in several papers and magazines.

I asked him what happened to the people that sold him the options. He answered: nonya.

nonya?. I said.

nonya fokin business!.

The time was early 1988 I think.

He should be famous on that story alone!.
 
Quote from eudaemon:

Nobel prizes are given only to socialists by a committee of communists. Ed would never have a chance.:D

They blew any remaining credibility with the Obama Peace Prize..
 
Quote from atticus:

I talked to Tony a lot one Summer during lunch near the CBOE. He turned virtually everything into credit long flies and condors. His fly inventory was ridiculous. IIRC he had one pinned expiration in which he made North of $10MM.
Cottle describes a interesting gamma scalping technique that he credits to Saliba. Instead of adjusting deltas with the underlying, Saliba would adjust with backspreads, in both directions. These adjustments pile on more and more gamma (and theta burn as a consequence), but apparently, Saliba did very well with them.

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Geboadk6Ec8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
Nassim Taleb is the man. Reading his books makes the entire pursuit of option selling incoherant and overly risky. I would trade an out of the money strategy in this market for sure.
 
Back
Top