Quote from theTaoTrader:
Supply/demand of an option and therefore its price are determined by sellers and buyers' assessment of the underlying volatility during the period from current time till expiration day. MMs are merely facilitating their transactions.
That's fine. But if the models are saying that pricing the options outside where they are priced "correctly" whether there is a supply/demand issue doesn't change the mathematics and probabilities. I would think they are only going to make a market where they have the odds on their side, and the "only" way to know that is with the models? Otherwise, why use them at all?
Either a) they are underpriced, b) priced correctly, or c)
overpriced. In the two cases where they are over/under priced, judged by comparison with the pricing given by BS, I would love to know why that model these guys are using to make markets allows them to ("mis")price an option by 50% of what the BS gives? If you told me, "they take BS and then use VIX to further tune the spread of the market they are making," at least that would make sense...
...With war and corp. scandals over, and the earnings have been mostly inline with expectations lately, I can see why the volatility in the equity market is low. Though I expect it will go higher when we have a correction or even a crash.
Huh? Of the 500 companies in the SP500 that have reported, more than 2/3 of them beat expectation, though looking forward they are once again catious of future earnings.
...Interestingly the CBOT 10-Year Note option's IV is over 13% today. It was only two weeks ago when the IV was below 8%, a 62% increase. Talking about the volatility of volatility, the stuff the GARCH models try to deal with. Again this high IV is not "set" by MMs, rather it's those big banks. Their opinions on the future interest rate movement "set" the price of the option price and therefore the IV.
Ok. BTW, I noticed that one of the inputs to SABR is volvol.
...For short term options, its premium and Greeks are not sensitive to the risk free interest rate. I used 1% for convenience. 2% won't make much difference.
Thanks. I noticed that by playing around with the interest rate and noticing the little change in the option price. It was more of an academic question...
nitro