Risk mitigation.

[ironchef]

I always remembered the "no arbitrage principle" in options trading: There is no risk free way to profit from a trade, otherwise someone, probably the MM, will trade it and renders it no longer risk free.

I only trade stock options so don't understand CL futures. I always thought for futures, the price was determined by the net present value of the risk free interest rate? If so my non expert thinking is if you can hedge without cost, then your only profit will be the risk free rate?

Another thought: If your trade is already profitable, then you can protect your profits with a costless collar?

You options experts on ET please help us out. Thanks.

 

[water7]

C) Possibly make profit on both the underlying and the option, no matter which way the price moves?

yes you can trade the price ranges

people can use a very simple structure like fly or condor
the basic idea is you want price to stay within a range under a specific time frames

this is a very easy plug-and-play options setup
you need to play with it for a while, getting used to it..

after that we can move to the next chapter
maybe :]

 

[punisher]

Why wouldn't you be able to have several uncorrelated (as much as possible) events (trades) where you are risking only a small part of your portfolio on each (say less than 1% per trade)?

I wouldn't be able to since I'm too dumb to play options (maybe even trading in general). Besides that, everything seems to be somehow correlated in the markets, one way or another. And there is no realistic way to place/manage thousands of trades to try make it as little correlated as possible. I don't think that "several uncorrelated trades" could be compared to "massive number of uncorrelated insured events" where we're talking about tens/hundreds of thousand. Anyone attempting to short options should do him/her self a favor and look first into how insurance companies operate profitably.

 

[punisher]

this is a very easy plug-and-play options setup
you need to play with it for a while, getting used to it..

you meant to say simple, not easy...

as I said before, with options you not only need to have an opinion on what the price of the underlying might or might not do, but also need to get the timeframe and usually volatility right. Plenty of things to consider as far as I'm concerned.