Tag: alternative investments

Discussing Retirement Bucket Strategies with Fritz Gilbert – SWR Series Part 55

January 25, 2023 – Welcome to another part of my Safe Withdrawal Rate Series. Today’s topic: Bucket Strategies in retirement. As you know, my blogging buddy Fritz Gilbert has written extensively on this topic at his Retirement Manifesto blog, for example:

And likewise, I have written about my skepticism of bucket strategies in Part 48 of the series: “Retirement Bucket Strategies: Cheap Gimmick or the Solution to Sequence Risk?”

Fritz’s most recent post on the Bucket Strategy started a lively back-and-forth on Twitter, and it seemed appropriate to pursue a more detailed discussion with more than 280 characters per answer in a “fight of the titans” blog post. So if you haven’t done so already, please check out our awesome discussion over on Fritz’s blog:

Is The Bucket Strategy A Cheap Gimmick?

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and we decided to craft a follow-up post here on my blog. We came up with two new questions, and we also need to address two major themes from the comments section in Part 1, specifically, the role of simplicity and behavioral biases in retirement planning.

So, let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Discussing Retirement Bucket Strategies with Fritz Gilbert – SWR Series Part 55” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 10 – Year 2022 Review

January 9, 2023 – Happy New Year, everyone! I haven’t written any updates on my put-writing strategy in a while, so I thought this is an excellent opportunity to review the year 2022 performance and some of the changes I have made since my last write-up in late 2021.

Let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 10 – Year 2022 Review” →

Low-Cost Leverage: The “Box Spread” Trade

December 9, 2021 – Last month, I published Part 49 of my Safe Withdrawal Rate Series, dealing with leverage in retirement. In that post, I surmised that the cheapest form of leverage likely comes in the form of a margin loan in an Interactive Brokers (IB) account. If you have the IB Pro account you have access to loan rates tied to the Federal Funds Rate plus a tiered spread ranging from 0.3% to 1.5%. Though, the really low rates don’t start until your loan reaches at least $3,000,000. For more manageable loan amounts that the average retail investor would use, we’re looking at a higher spread: 1.50% spread for the first $100,000 and 1.00% over the Fed Funds Rate for the next $900k. With the current effective Fed Funds Rate at around between 0.08% and 0.10%, that’s a very competitive rate. Certainly better than a Home Equity Line Of Credit (HELOC).

In the comments section, though, a reader brought up an idea for an even lower-cost method for borrowing against your assets: an exotic options trade called a “box spread”. I had heard of this trade before but never put much thought into it. And I certainly didn’t put any money into that idea. But just for fun, I researched this trade some more and even initiated one box spread trade on Monday, essentially issuing a synthetic $20,000 zero-coupon bond maturing in December 2026 at a very competitive interest rate, significantly lower what you’d get from IB.

So, in today’s post, I like to go through the basics of the Box Spread, how to implement it and how this trade could in fact give us a cheaper form of leverage than even the rock-bottom rates from IB. Let’s take a look at the details…

Continue reading “Low-Cost Leverage: The “Box Spread” Trade” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 9 – 2016-2021 backtest: Guest Post by “Spintwig”

November 10, 2021 – Welcome to a new post in the Put Option Writing Series. My blogging buddy Spintwig volunteered to perform another backtest simulation. If you remember from Part 5, he simulated selling 5-delta and 10-delta put options going back to 2018. He now added 18 more months of returns to go back to September 2016. In the end, I will also compare my live results with the simulated returns and point out why my live trading achieved even slightly better results.

Mr. Spintwig, please take over…

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Thank you BigERN (can I call you Dr. K?) for another opportunity to collaborate and add to the body of research that supports what is colloquially known as the “BigERN strategy.”

Part 8 of the options trading series is a 2021 update that discusses, among other things, premium capture, annualized return and the idea of lowering leverage while increasing delta.

Let’s throw some data at the idea of trading a higher delta at a lower leverage target and see how metrics like premium capture, CAGR, and max drawdown are impacted. As an added bonus, I’ve obtained SPX data that can facilitate a Sept 2016 start date for this strategy. This gives us an additional 18 months of history vs the SPY data that was used in Part 5.

For the benchmark, we’ll use total return (i.e. dividends reinvested) buy/hold SPY (S&P 500) and IEF (10Y US Treasuries), rebalanced annually, in the following configurations:

  • 100 SPY / 0 IEF
  • 80 SPY / 20 IEF
  • 60 SPY / 40 IEF

Let’s dive in…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 9 – 2016-2021 backtest: Guest Post by “Spintwig”” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 8 – A 2021 Update

October 18, 2021 – After three posts in a row about safe withdrawal rates, parts 46, 47, and 48 of the series, let’s make sure we have the right level of diversity here. Welcome to a new installment of the option writing series! I wanted to give a brief update on several different fronts:

  1. A quick YTD performance update.
  2. How does the option selling strategy fit into my overall portfolio? Is this a 100% fixed income strategy because that’s where I hold the margin cash? Or a 100% equity strategy because I trade puts on margin on top of that? Or maybe even a 200+% equity strategy because I use somewhere around 2x to 2.5x leverage?
  3. By popular demand: Big ERN’s “super-secret sauce” for accounting for the intra-day adjustments of the Options Greeks. This is a timely topic because the Interactive Brokers values for the SPX Put Options seem to be wildly off the mark, especially for options close to expiration. So, you have to get your hands dirty and calculate your own options Greeks, especially the Delta estimates.
  4. There’s one slight change in the strategy I recently made: I trade fewer contracts but with a higher Delta thus reducing my leverage and the possibility of extreme tail-risk events.

Let’s dive right in…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 8 – A 2021 Update” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 7 – Careful when shorting long-dated options!

May 3, 2021 – Welcome back to a new installment of the options series! In the discussion following the previous post (Part 6), a reader suggested the following: In recent history, the index has never lost more than 50% over the span of one year. Then why not simply write (=short) a put option, about one year out, with a strike 50+% below today’s index level? Make it extra safe and use a strike 60% below today’s index!

12-month rolling S&P 500 index returns (price index only, not total returns!).

So, let’s take a look at the following scenario where we short a put option on the S&P 500 index slightly more than a year out and with a strike about 60% below the current index level:

  • Trading date: 4/30/2021
  • Index level at inception: 4,181.17
  • Expiration: 6/16/2022
  • Strike: 1,700 (=59.2% below the index)
  • Option premium: $11.50
  • Multiplier: 100x  (so, we receive $1,150 per short contract, minus about $1.50 in commission)
  • Initial Margin: $4,400, maintenance margin: $4,000

In other words, as a percentage of the initial margin, we can generate about 26% return over about 13.5 months. Annualized that’s still slightly above 23%! Even if we put down $15,000 instead of the bare minimum initial margin, we’re still looking at about 6.8% annualized return. If that’s a truly bulletproof and 100% safe return that’s nothing to sneeze at. A 6.8% safe return certainly beats the 0.1% safe return in a money market, right? Does that mean we have solved that pesky Sequence Risk problem?

Here are a few reasons to be skeptical about this strategy…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 7 – Careful when shorting long-dated options!” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 6 – A 2018-2021 backtest with different contract sizes: Guest Post by “Spintwig”

All parts of this series:

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April 21, 2021 – Welcome to a new installment about trading options. Alongside my work on Safe Withdrawal Rates, this is my other passion. In fact, on a day-to-day basis, I probably think about shorting S&P 500 put option much more than about Safe Withdrawal Rates. In any case, one of the most frequent questions I’ve been getting related to my options trading strategy is, how do you even get started with this strategy when you have a smaller-size account? Trading CBOE SPX options, with a multiplier of 100x on the underlying S&P index, even one single contract will have a notional exposure of roughly $400,000. I don’t recommend trading that without at least about $100,000 or better $125,000 or more in margin cushion.

How would one implement this without committing such a large chunk of money? 

My options trading buddy Mr. Spintwig who already published another guest post in this series offered to shed some light on this question. He ran some simulations for my strategy using some of the other “option options” (pardon the pun), i.e., implementing my strategy not with the SPX index options but with different vehicles with a smaller multiple than the currently pretty massive 100x SPX contract. For example, the options on S&P 500 E-mini futures are certainly a slightly smaller alternative with a multiplier of only 50. And there are some even smaller-size contract alternatives, but my concern has always been that the transaction costs will likely eat up a good chunk of the strategy’s returns. 

In any case, I’ll stop babbling. Mr. Spintwig has the numbers, so please take over…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 6 – A 2018-2021 backtest with different contract sizes: Guest Post by “Spintwig”” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 5 – A 2018-2020 backtest: Guest Post by “Spintwig” (plus a quick update on last week’s volatility)

All parts of this series:

* * *

June 17, 2020 – Welcome back to another post centered around Put Option Writing. Today we got a real treat because my blogging buddy, fellow option trader and frequent commenter “Spintwig” offered to do a guest post to perform an independent review of my trading strategy. If you don’t know Spintwig, he also retired in 2018 (at age 30!!!) from a career in ITnd now writes about FIRE and options strategies at his blog. He does a lot of interesting and important work, including careful and comprehensive back-tests of different option trading strategies, i.e., different underlying assets, different Deltas, different horizons (days to expiration), etc. I highly recommend you check out his work if you’re interested in option writing!

Oh, and following the guest post, I’ll also give a quick update on how my portfolio did during the crazy,  scary volatility last week! Stay tuned!

Over to you Mr. Spintwig…

Thank you BigERN for the opportunity to peer review your options strategy and publically share the results with you and your readers. I’ve relied on your research in my own journey to and through FIRE and I’m happy to be able to add to the discussion and body of research.

A few years ago I stumbled upon BigERN’s blog as I was researching safe-withdrawal-rate topics. Among the material was a novel idea: selling put options on the S&P 500 index could mitigate sequence-of-return risk.

The concept was straightforward but I wanted to know if there was an optimal approach or if it could be applied to other indices and have similar results. Would it be advantageous to replace a traditional buy-and-hold portfolio with an options trading strategy? Unfortunately, there were no definitive or trustworthy answers to this question on the internet so I set out to do my own research and publish what I find.

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 5 – A 2018-2020 backtest: Guest Post by “Spintwig” (plus a quick update on last week’s volatility)” →

Passive income through option writing: Part 4 – Surviving a Bear Market!

June 10, 2020 – Welcome back to another post dealing with an investing strategy that’s central to our own retirement strategy here in the ERN household. Just a bit of background: about 35% of our financial net worth is currently invested in this strategy. But it accounts for more than 50% of our taxable assets, so for our early retirement cash flow planning, this is really serious business. This puts food on the table in the ERN household!

If you’re not familiar with this strategy, I’ve written about the topic of option writing to generate (retirement) income in general and my personal approach here:

The first three links are more about the general philosophy and the last link, Part 3, is about how I’ve been running the strategy most recently. The strategy involves writing (=selling/shorting) put options on the S&P 500 index with a little bit of leverage. And one can also keep the majority of the account in income-producing assets (bond funds, preferred stocks) to generate additional cash flow. Sweet!

In light of the recent market volatility, of course, it would be a good time to do an update on my strategy because I’ve gotten a lot of questions on how that strategy has been holding up during the bear market. Did it blow up? You are all a bunch of rubbernecks, aren’t you? 🙂

Long story short, my strategy did pretty well so far this year. Not just despite but even because of the volatility spike. Let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 4 – Surviving a Bear Market!” →

Three Equity Investing Styles that did OK in 2020

April 22, 2020 – Recently, I wrote a post endorsing the simple Bogleheads approach: invest in passive index ETFs. Everything else is just mumbo-jumbo, window-dressing and people not understanding the (mostly) efficient market nature of the stock market. In other words…

Simple (indexing) beats complicated active investing

Well, after unloading on some of the fancy complicated investing styles, I just like to point out the select few of them that indeed performed relatively well in 2020. At least better than the index. So, for the record, I’d also like to write about three examples where…

Complicated beats simple index investing

And most importantly, I’m not pulling some “Monday Morning Quarterback” nonsense telling you that if you could have sold your airline stocks in February and replaced them with stocks for video conferencing makers you could have done really well. Well, duh, very few people other than U.S. Senators had that kind of inside information back in February! Rather, I want to write about some of the deviations from simple indexing that were mentioned here on the blog in my posts and/or in the comments. Before the crisis!

Let’s take a look:

Continue reading “Three Equity Investing Styles that did OK in 2020” →