Weekly Poll: Don't Short A Dull Market?

[shortie]

max pain:
SPY 110
QQQQ 45

we are less than 1% away and 2 days to go. according to my limited understanding max pain should be a decent attractor when the underlying is so close to it.

 

[S2007S]

Tomorrows job report will move markets especially if the number is 495k+, 500,000+ and the markets are headed further down rather quickly.

 

[Runningbear]

Quote from trefoil:

There were a few good theories in the blog post shortie linked to, but I first read about this in Barron's ages ago, and it was supposed to be due strictly to the hedging activity of options market makers: given that more puts than calls are usually traded, closing them out would give op ex week a bullish bias, and the week after, when new puts would be opened, would force the market makers to hedge these with shorts on their underlyings, and so would wind up being net bearish.
We have a lot of sophisticated options folks here, so maybe one of them will come in and tell us if what I read as the reason why was true or not.
I think the caveat in the blog post about small sample sizes would apply to any month-by-month breakdown of this bias. Our children and grandchildren will have better info on this than we ever will.

Does this imply that the week beginning August 23 is likely to be bearish?

 

[trefoil]

Somewhere in cyberspace is a blog entry from someone who studied the day after op ex Friday minutely, and decided that there was no correlation between a down op ex Friday and an up Monday after, or vice versa. So, no.

 

[Wholesale-Trade]

I think still their are no chances of improvement

 

[S2007S]

Quote from S2007S:

Tomorrows job report will move markets especially if the number is 495k+, 500,000+ and the markets are headed further down rather quickly.

And 500,000 it was, futures turned south just as expected.

Dow futures were up 50+ now down 15.

Going to be an interesting day, let's see if the bulls can turn this market back into the green.

 

[Tsing Tao]

never underestimate the power of skynet!

 

[shortie]

Quote from shortie:

somebody is making a small kill selling those straddles:

today is a good illustration of problems with short straddles: a large market move and those short straddles don't look so good.

 

[tradingjournals]

Quote from tradingjournals:

. So Thursday may lead to a close of the recent gap, and then a boring Friday?

TJ Shortie Out (for Thursday's action)

 

[tradingjournals]

Quote from shortie:

today is a good illustration of problems with short straddles: a large market move and those short straddles don't look so good.

It depends on which straddle, and when.