How Option Expiration Turned Out for My Subscribers

• stevenplace
• December 21st, 2009

I love opex. Equity options have very interesting characteristics like discontinuities in gamma and very fast theta (time decay).

So when opex comes around, I provide my subscribers with a list of ideas for trading that day– this month we focused strictly on option selling with 1 day left. I also provided a video explaining the techniques for trading at opex as well as a spreadsheet of what I think would work. They are below– do note that the prices for these straddles were from Thursday close and weren’t indicative of opening prices:

So what happens here is we see where the market is headed on the open, and then we look to sell some options around a particular strike, assuming that the majority of the move is done for the day.

Just for the record, here was the level of difference with the strikes I picked and the closing prices:

So on the open I tweeted this:

And a few of my subscribers had a great day managing these positions — AAPL, FSLR, and RIMM (that’s for another post…) were all big winners that day.

One of the great things about having a premium twitter feed is the fast access– and that feature will be enhanced going into 2010:

That’s the goal of my premium service– to learn new techniques in option trading, develop a tight community, and to make some serious money! If you haven’t seen results from this past opex (they don’t include these short term trades), we had a 5% month, making nearly $2,000 on a model portfolio of 40k– not bad for $50/month.

Tickers: aapl, bidu, fcx, fslr, goog, gs, rimm

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