One of my favorite stock option plays is to make a bet that sometime in the future, a particular stock will be no lower than it is today. If you are right, you can make 50% – 100% without doing anything other than making a single option trade and waiting out the time period. Ten weeks ago, I made two specific recommendations (see my September 8, 2015 blog) for making this kind of bet, one which would make 62% in 4 months and the other 100% in that same time period. Today I would like to update those suggestions and discuss a little about how you set up the option trade if you know of a company you feel good about.

If you missed them, be sure to check out the short videos which explains why I like calendar spreads, and How to Make Adjustments to Calendar and Diagonal Spreads.

Terry

How to Make Extraordinary Returns with Semi-Long Option Plays

What is a long-term bet in the options world? A month? A week? I spend most of my time selling options that have only a week of remaining life. Sometimes they only have a day of life before they expire (hopefully worthless). So I don’t deal with long-term options, at least most of the time.

Most options plays are short-term plays. People who trade options tend to have short-term time horizons. Maybe they have ADHD and can’t handle long waits to learn whether they made a gain or not. But there are all sorts of different ways you can structure options plays. While most of my activity involves extremely short-term bets, I also have quite a bit of money devoted to longer-term bets which take 4 months to a year before the pay-day comes along.

One of my favorite semi-long (if there is such a word) option plays involves picking a stock which I particularly like for the long run, or one which has been beaten down for some reason which doesn’t seem quite right. When I find such a stock, I place a bet that sometime in the future, it will be at least as high as it is now. If I am right, I can usually make 50% – 100% on the bet, and I know in advance exactly what the maximum possible gain or loss will be, right to the penny.

Ten weeks ago, I liked where the price of SVXY was. This ETP is inversely correlated with option volatility. When volatility moves higher, SVXY falls, and vice versa. At the time, fears of a world-wide slowdown were emerging. Markets fell and volatility soared. VIX, the so-called “fear index” rose from the 12 – 14 range it had maintained for a couple of years to over 20. SVXY tanked to $45, and had edged up to $47 when I recommended placing a bet that in 4 months (on January 15, 2016), SVXY would be $40 or higher.

This trade would make the maximum gain even if SVXY fell by $7 and remained above $40 on that date:

Buy to Open 1 SVXY Jan-16 35 put (SVXY160115P35)
Sell to Open 1 SVXY Jan-16 40 put (SVXY160115P40) for a credit of $1.95 (selling a vertical)

Quoting from my September 8th blog, “When this trade was executed, $192.50 (after a $2.50 commission) went into my account. If on January 15, 2016, SVXY is at any price higher than $40, both of these puts will expire worthless, and for every vertical spread I sold, I won’t have to make a closing trade, and I will make a profit of exactly $192.50.

So how much do I have to put up to place this trade? The broker looks at these positions and calculates that the maximum loss that could occur on them would be $500 ($100 for every dollar of stock price below $40). For that to happen, SVXY would have to close below $35 on January 15th. Since I am quite certain that it is headed higher, not lower, a drop of this magnitude seems highly unlikely to me.

The broker will place a $500 maintenance requirement on my account. This is not a loan where interest is charged, but merely cash I can’t use to buy shares of stock. However, since I have collected $192.50, I can’t lose the entire $500. My maximum loss is the difference between the maintenance requirement and what I collected, or $307.50.

If SVXY closes at any price above $40 on January 15, both puts will expire worthless and the maintenance requirement disappears. I don’t have to do anything except think of how I will spend my profit of $192.50. I will have made 62% on my investment. Where else can you make this kind of return for as little risk as this trade entails?

Of course, as with all investments, you should only risk what you can afford to lose. But I believe the likelihood of losing on this investment is extremely low. The stock is destined to move higher, not lower, as soon as the current turbulent market settles down.

If you wanted to take a little more risk, you might buy the 45 put and sell a 50 put in the Jan-15 series. You would be betting that the stock manages to move a little higher over the next 4 months. You could collect about $260 per spread and your risk would be $240. If SVXY closed any higher than $50 (which history says that it should), your profit would be greater than 100%. I have also placed this spread trade in my personal account (and my charitable trust account as well).”

It is now 10 weeks later. SVXY is trading at $58 ½. I could buy back the first spread for $.45 ($47.50 after commissions). That would give me a $145 profit on my maximum risk of $307.50. That works out to a 47% gain for 10 weeks. That was easy money for me.

The other spread I suggested, raising the strikes of both the long and short sides by $10, could have been sold for $260. You could buy back the spread for $102.50 including commissions, giving you a profit of $157.50 on a maximum risk of $240, or 65%. Or you could just wait it out and enjoy the full 108% gain if SVXY closes no lower than $50 on the third Friday in January. I am hanging on to both my original bets and not selling now unless something better comes along.

In some Terry’s Tips, we make similar investments like this each January, betting that one year later, stocks we like will be at least where they were at the time. The portfolio we set up this year made those kinds of bets on GOOG, AAPL, and SPY. It will make 92% on the maximum amount at risk in 6 weeks if these three stocks are where they are today or any higher when the January 2016 puts expire. In fact, GOOG could fall by $155 and we would still make over 100% on that spread we had sold in January 2015. We could close out all three spreads today and make a gain of 68% on our maximum risk.

These are just some examples of how you can make longer-term bets on your favorite stocks with options, and making extraordinary gains even if the stock doesn’t do much of anything.

 

One of the best times to set up an options strategy is just before a company announces earnings.  Today I would like to share our experience doing this last month with Facebook (FB) last month.  I hope you will read all the way through – there is some important information there.If you missed them, be sure to check out the short videos which explains why I like calendar spreads , and  How to Make Adjustments to Calendar and Diagonal Spreads.

Terry

How to Set Up a Pre-Earnings Announcement Options Strategy

When a company reports results each quarter, the stock price often fluctuates far more than usual, depending on how well the company performs compared both to past performance and to the market’s collective level of expectations.  Anticipating a big move one way or another, just prior to the announcement, option prices skyrocket, both puts and calls.

At Terry’s Tips, our basic strategy involves selling short-term options to others (using longer-term options as collateral for making those sales).  One of the absolute best times for us is the period just before an upcoming earnings announcement. That is when we can collect the most premium.

An at-the-money call (stock price and strike price are the same) for a call with a month of remaining life onFacebook (FB) trades for about $3 ($300 per call).  If that call expires shortly after an earnings announcement, it will trade for about $4.80.  That is a significant difference. In options parlance, option prices are “high” or “low” depending on their implied volatility (IV).  IV is much higher for all options series in the weeks before the announcement.  IV is at its absolute highest in the series that expires just after the announcement.  Usually that is a weekly option series.

Here are IV numbers for FB at-the-money calls before and after the November 4th earnings announcement:

One week option life before, IV = 57  One week option life after, IV = 25
Two week option life before, IV = 47  Two week option life after, IV = 26
One month option life before, IV =38  One month option life after, IV = 26
Four month option life before, IV = 35  Four month option life after, IV = 31

These numbers clearly show that when you are buying a 4-month-out call (March, IV=35) and selling a one-week out call (IV=57), before an announcement, you are buying less expensive options (lower IV) than those which you are selling. After the announcement, this gets reversed.  The short-term options you are selling are relatively less expensive than the ones you are buying.  Bottom line, before the announcement, you are buying low and selling high, and after the announcement, you are buying high and selling low.

You can make a lot of money buying a series of longer-term call options and selling short-term calls at several strike prices in the series that expires shortly after the announcement.  If the long and short sides of your spread are at the same strike price, you call it a calendar spread, and if the strikes are at different prices, it is called a diagonal spread.

Calendar and diagonal spreads essentially work the same, with the important point being the strike price of the short option that you have sold.  The maximum gain for your spread will come if the stock price ends up exactly at that strike price when the option expires.  If you can correctly guess the price of the stock after the announcement, you can make a ton of money.

But as we all know, guessing the short-term price of a stock is a really tough thing to do, especially when you are trying to guess where it might end up shortly after the announcement.  You never know how well the company has done, or more importantly, how the market will react to how the company has performed.  For that reason, we recommend selecting selling short-term options at several different strike prices.  This increases your chances of having one short strike which gains you the maximum amount possible.

Here are the positions held in our actual FB portfolio at Terry’s Tips on Friday, October 30th, one week before the Nov-1 15 calls would expire just after FB announced earnings on November 4th:

We owned calls which expired in March 2016 at 3 different strikes (97.5, 100, and 105) and we were short calls with one week of remaining life at 4 different strikes (103, 105, 106, and 107). There was one calendar spread at the 105 strike and all the others were diagonal spreads.  We owned 2 more calls than we were short.  This is often part of our strategy just before announcement day.  A fairly large percent of the time, the stock moves higher in the day or two before the announcement as anticipation of a positive report kicks in.  We planned to sell another call before the announcement, hopefully getting a higher price than we would have received earlier.  (We sold a Nov1-15 204 call for $2.42 on Monday).  We were feeling pretty positive about the stock, and maintained a more bullish (higher net delta position) than we normally do.

Here is the risk profile graph for the above positions.  It shows our expected gain or loss one week later (after the announcement) when the Nov1-15 calls expired:

When we produced this graph, we instructed the software to assume that IV for the Mar-16 calls would fall from 35 to 30 after the announcement.  If we hadn’t done that, the graph would have displayed unrealistically high possible returns.  You can see with this assumption, a flat stock price should result in a $300 gain, and if the stock rose $2 or higher, the gain would be in the $1000 range (maybe a bit higher if the stock was up just moderately because of the additional $242 we collected from selling another call).

So what happened?  FB announced earnings that the market liked.  The stock soared from about $102 to about $109 after the announcement (but then fell back a bit on Friday, closing at $107.10).  We bought back the expiring Nov1-15 calls (all of which were in the money on Thursday or Friday) and sold further-out calls at several strike prices to get set up for the next week.   The portfolio gained $1301 in value, rising from $7046 to $8347, up 18.5% for the week.  This is just a little better than our graph predicted.  The reason for the small difference is that IV for the March calls fell only to 31, and we had estimated that it would fall to 30.

You can see why we like earnings announcement time, especially when we are right about the direction the stock moves.  In this case, we would have made a good gain no matter how high the stock might go (because we had one uncovered long call).  Most of the time, we select short strikes which yield a risk profile graph with more downside protection and limited upside potential (a huge price rise would yield a lower gain, and possibly a loss).

One week earlier, in our Starbucks (SBUX) portfolio, we had another earnings week.  SBUX had a positive earnings report, but the market was apparently disappointed with guidance and the level of sales in China, and the stock was pushed down a little after the announcement.  Our portfolio managed to gain 18% for the week.

Many people would be happy with 18% a year on their invested capital, and we have done it in a single week in which an earnings announcement took place.  We look forward to having three more such weeks when reporting season comes around once again over the course of a year, both for these two underlyings and the 4 others we also trade (COST, NKE, JNJ, and SPY).
“I have confidence in your system…I have seen it work very well…currently I have had a first 100% gain, and am now working to diversify into more portfolios.  Goldman/Sachs is also doing well – up about 40%…

This week I would like to share with you (for the first time ever) every option position we hold in every stock-based actual portfolio we carry out at Terry’s Tips.  You can access this report here.If you missed it last week, be sure to check out the short videos which explains why I like calendar spreads, and  How to Make Adjustments to Calendar and Diagonal Spreads.

There is a lot of material to cover in the report and videos, but I hope you will be willing to make the effort to learn a little about a non-traditional way to make greater investment returns than just about anything out there.

Terry

First Saturday Report with October 2015 Results

Here is a summary of how well our 5 stock-based portfolios using our 10K Strategy performed last month as well as for their entire lifetime:

 

While it was a good month for the market, the best in 4 years, our 5 portfolios outperformed the market by 166% in October.

Enjoy the full report here.