Can you tell me the best way to get to this point? Being able to do this?
Opinions please.............???
- Thread starter ADONAI1ST
- Start date
Can you tell me the best way to get to this point? Being able to do this?
Here you described a option stradegy, was it a iron condor, or something along those lines or was this a trade you came up with. I know it was a option but not much else. It's starting to come back to me now. A little anyway.
Nothing magical in there. (Nothing magical about any of this. A lot of first and second derivatives, and a crap-ton-load of sign changes. Hoo boy. I used to teach math. I was a non-mathematician, *struggled* with it all, and then found out the dirty little secret that it *is* just a language, and that repetition and everyday usage was necessary. But I found that teaching math to others was easy -- it was mainly in debunking the notion that math was all formally thought-out ahead of time, and not pieced together *nearly* haphazardly by people who struggled just like me.)
"Iron Condor"..... correct! "Iron" only because it contains both calls and puts -- there is nothing metallic, hard, magnetic, or the least bit ferrous, about it. It could have been named "blue" or "checkerboard" instead......
"Condor" only because the at-expiration pay-off line looks like a Pilgrim's Hat, but the term was coined more by people who like winged stuff, like the "butterfly" (which, of course, "I mean, ask any child!" looks more like a Witch's Hat)....
Just accidents. Scientifically, these names are artifacts of construction, and hold close-to-no special meaning. Take a 2-option put-call strategy in which, when held long, the two legs shoot up to form a "V" from a single strike, or a "\__/" from two separate strikes. Now, between "straddle" and "strangle", to which strategy would you apply which name? Now, a *sensible* person (or professional *group* of persons) would think the V should be associated with the narrower-sounding "strangle", while the broader "straddle" should be teamed with the \__/. Make sense?
But no. This implies too that "straddle" was named first, and given that that more-apt name was already taken, when \__/ was becoming a more-utilized strategy and needed a name, the second-choice "strangle" was applied. And there, history is written.
Hoo boy. It's like tracing North American standard rail widths back to Roman warhorse butt-widths. "Careful with that name, Joe! It might be around a while!"
Okay, so, yeah: Iron Condor. Could be two strangles done long and short. Could be two verticals laid on a week apart. (Or, an hour apart. Or, 5 *minutes* apart.) Could be laid on as an iron condor. Either way, 4 options to enter and a second use of (SEC) margined capital at risk.
Don't worry about the names. They are artifacts, and hold no magic. There is only those payoff-at-expiration graphs, lots of changes of sign, and the gnarly little things worked by The Greeks on the way there. *That* counts.
("And then, he steppeth down off his soapeth box, and ceaseth his preachments.....")
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You just made *my* day...
I was lost when you made the original post last week. I had to go back and read it a few times but I got it. It's gonna take awhile to get back to the lingo. These acronyms are killing me right now!
