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”July 5, 2022
Over the last few decades, we’ve become accustomed to a negative correlation between stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds. Bonds used to serve as a great diversifier against macroeconomic risk. Specifically, the last four downturns in 1991, 2001, 2007-2009, and 2020 were all so-called “demand-side” recessions where the drop in GDP went hand-in-hand with lower inflation because a drop in demand also lowered price pressures. The Federal Reserve then lowered interest rates, which lifted bonds. This helped tremendously with hedging against the sharp declines in your stock portfolio. And in the last two recessions, central banks even deployed asset purchase programs to further bolster the returns of long-duration nominal government bonds. Sweet!
Well, just when people start treating a statistical artifact as the next Law of Thermodynamics, the whole correlation collapses. Bonds got hammered in 2022, right around the time when stocks dropped! At one point, intermediate (10Y) Treasury bonds had a worse drawdown than even the S&P 500 index. So much for diversification!
So, is the worst over now for bonds? Maybe not. The future for nominal bonds looks uncertain. We are supposed to believe that with relatively modest rate hikes, to 3.4% by the end of this year and 3.8% by the end of 2023, as predicted by the median FOMC member at the June 14/15, 2022 meeting, inflation will miraculously come under control. As I wrote in my last post, that doesn’t quite pass the smell test because it violates the Taylor Principle. The Wall Street Journal quipped, “The Cost of Wishful Thinking on Inflation Is Going Up Too”. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for inflation to subside easily, but at least we should be prepared for some significant upside risk on inflation and interest rates. Watch out for the July 13 CPI release, everybody!
So, trying to avoid nominal bonds, how do we accomplish derisking and diversification? Here are ten suggestions…
Continue reading “Hedging Against Inflation and Monetary Policy Risk”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”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:
Let’s dive in…
Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 9 – 2016-2021 backtest: Guest Post by “Spintwig””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:
Let’s dive right in…
Continue reading “Passive income through option writing: Part 8 – A 2021 Update”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!
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:
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!”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””February 22, 2021
In late January, I wrote about my thoughts on the crazy wild ride in GameStop and some other meme stocks. Now might be a good time to do an update to talk about some of the other things I learned. For example, how a short-interest ratio of more than 100% is surely disconcerting but it’s not quite as scary as it’s often portrayed if you do your math right – which seems to be a luxury good these days!
So, here are some more of my thoughts on the 100%+ short interest, market manipulation, GameStop valuation, and more… Continue reading “Is a short-interest ratio above 100% really that scary? The GameStop Saga Part 2”
Update (February 8, 2021): Well, there you have it, GameStop is back closer to reality at around $60 as of today. It lost 80+% from the peak value. Who would have guessed that?!
January 30, 2021
Wow, what a week! I was reminded again why I prefer to be an index investor (for the most part). I don’t have to live through the wild price moves as we saw in GameStop (GME) and the other “meme stocks”. And I don’t have to worry about trading restrictions. But it was entertaining to watch the drama, stocks going up by 100+% in one day and seeing short-seller hedge funds being driven to the brink of ruin. The media certainly loved this story of David vs. Goliath; a mob of Reddit users in the “Wall Street Bets” (WSB) group vs. the powerful finance establishment! My blogging buddy Retire in Progress wrote a nice post about the GameStop Short Squeeze. But I also wanted to share some of my own thoughts. Let’s take a look…
All parts of this series:
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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)”
