Finance Newsletters: The Options Blog Newsletter

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A Market Taker Mentoring Free Options Newsletter

This Week in the Market

Big Week. Lots to get through.

Aug 26: Durable Goods

Aug 27: Consumer Confidence

Aug 29: GDP

Aug 29: Jobless Claims

Aug 30: Personal Income

Aug 30: Consumer Sentiment

Read the Options Blog online

Learning to Adjust Option Positions

Dan's online Options Education series this month (August series) has all been all about helping traders learn to adjust options positions. Adjusting option positions is an essential skill for options traders. Adjusting options positions helps traders repair strategies that have gone wrong (or are beginning to go wrong) and often turn losers into breakeven trades and winners. Given that, it's easy to see why it's important to learn to adjust options positions.

Adjusting 101

Adjusting options positions is a technique in which an option trader simply alters an existing options position to create a fundamentally different position. Traders are motivated to adjust options positions when the market outlook or physiology changes and the original trade no longer reflects the trader's thoughts. There is one golden rule of trading: ALWAYS make sure your position reflects your outlook.

This seems like a very obvious rule. And at the onset of any trade, it is. If I'm bullish, I'm going to take a positive delta position. If I think a stock will be range-bound, I'd take a close-to-zero delta trade that has positive theta to profit from sideways movement as time passes. But the problem is gamma. Gamma is the fly in the ointment of option trading.

Gamma

Gamma-particularly negative gamma-is the cause of the need for adjusting.

Gamma definition: Gamma is the rate of change of an option's (or option position's) delta relative to a change in the underling.

Oh, yeah. And, just in case you forgot...

Delta definition: Delta is the rate of change on an option's (or option position's) price relative to a change in the underlying.

In the case of negative gamma, trader's deltas always change the wrong way. When the underlying moves higher, the trader gets shorter delta (and loses money at an increasing rate). When the underlying moves lower, negative gamma makes deltas longer (again, causing the trader to lose money at an increasing rate).

Finally

Therefore, traders must learn to adjust options positions, especially income trades, in order to stave off adverse deltas created by the negative gamma that accompanies income trades. But remember, just because you can adjust a position doesn't mean you should!

To find out more about next month's topic and have access to the archived previous seminars including "Option Trade Adjustments" please visit Options Education.

John Kmiecik

Editor, The Options Blog Newsletter

Market Taker Mentoring

In This Issue

This Week's Blog

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