We often refer to the complementary nature of iron condors and calendar spreads, in that the former benefit from falling implied volatility, while the latter generally get a boost from rising IV. So does that mean you should balance out volatility risk by allocating as much capital to calendars each month as you do to iron condors? Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.
First, it’s important to think about where implied volatility might be headed, especially when it’s at one extreme or…
Volatility as an Asset Class: A guide to buying, selling, and trading third-generation volatility products, ed. Israel Nelken (London: Risk Books, 2007).
Israel Nelken, one of the members of the CBOE New Products Committee, has collected 11 essays on the theory and practice of trading volatility as a distinct asset class. The first half of the book examines the measurement of volatility and ways to employ volatility models on several traditional underlying products. The second half is devoted to discussion of…
Our head trader, Jared Woodard, will be presenting a free seminar tonight:
Using Iron Condors to Profit From Fear
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
9PM EST / 6PM PST
Commodity Trading School
http://www.commoditytradingschool.com/
“Using Iron Condors to Profit from Fear” will cover the structure and purpose of iron condor options spreads, and will explain how traders can use iron condors to generate income during periods of high volatility and uncertainty in the markets.
Jared gave this talk some months back, so those who missed it the first time around…
In our August monthly review, we expected that “the next phase of this bear market will likely be driven not by U.S. financial companies or by energy prices per se, but rather by the effects of the American slowdown being felt by the rest of the world.” See, that’s why we’re traders and not economists. Although in our defense, the reason AIG was nationalized was partly because of the effect its failure would have had on European and other counterparties. …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the widely discussed The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness, is out with a new paper. “The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics” pursues a thesis very familiar to his readers, namely that economists and finance professionals put society at risk by offering false comfort in the form of statistical models.
Risk Does Not Equal Volatility
The novel effort here is Taleb’s attempt to map out which kinds of risks and events are more-or-less adequately captured…
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
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