Iron Condor Management Results from 71,417 Trades [STUDY]
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- Опубліковано 15 гру 2024
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Selling iron condors is a very common trading strategy among income investors, as the trade has limited loss potential and a high probability of making money.
In this video, we examine 71,417 short iron condor trades in the S&P 500 to determine patterns related to managing the trades for profits or losses.
More specifically, we test 16 different profit/loss iron condor management combinations and see which ones were the most profitable and the least profitable. We also adjust each approach for the estimated commissions to determine which management combinations are viable in the real world.
Lastly, we filter all of the trades by the VIX level at the time of trade entry to determine the impact implied volatility has on the profitability of each iron condor management approach.
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It's absolutely insane that you are publishing this for free. Also, interesting to look at some of those charts that aren't adjusted for commissions. Thank you so much!
God bless you!!!!!
@@danielwestereng155 God bless you too. SGD
@ayo9057yes
As some one who is currently working on my own iron condor study this was an absolute insane video to have recommended to me right now. Amazing work thank you for publishing this for everyone to learn from.
This is gold, I cannot immagine the amount of hours spent for this back-testing. So if I get it right, my takeaways are: 1) when Vix is rich (Ie equal or above 23.5) go for 30d IC, in other cases, when Vix lower than 23.5 , then go for 16d IC and manage profit at 50% or higher. Thx man
Great summary/reminder, thank you!
When did he say 16dte?
@@jasonpermanna308 16 delta , not 16 days to expiry
@@jasonpermanna308it’s 16 Delta vs 30 Delta comparison
@@jasonpermanna308 delta
This is gold
Thank you, Matthew!
projectoption I assume you know that the vix is extremely low right now and implied volatility rank in a lot of securities are very low, do you reccomend trading the iron fly to take in enough credit as opposed to the iron condor where right now it's almost impossible to take in enough credit to make sense of the trade.
That's a difficult question for me to answer. My gut response is to tell you it depends on what you believe makes sense regarding risk/reward.
The cheap credits you're seeing are because of the non-existent stock volatility observed in the market right now. Do you think stock volatility will continue to stay suppressed, or transition to a higher vol period?
If you believe vol will remain suppressed, then those cheap iron condor/iron fly credits are still expensive relative to the stock price fluctuations being observed right now. The benefit of using an iron fly is that you'll be compensated more (generally speaking) if you're correct about stock volatility remaining suppressed into the near future. Depending on your iron fly trade structure, you could have substantially better risk/reward compared to selling an iron condor.
Either way, I think using defined risk strategies is a smart move because the risk of selling options in this environment is not that you're selling cheap options--the options are "cheap" for a reason. The risk is selling the options now only to see their prices adjusted sharply higher after a substantial increase in realized market volatility (some might call this vega risk or volatility risk).
These are just some ideas and many of the comments above are generalizations. Either way, I hope my answer helped!
-Chris
projectoption I was more thinking of fair pricing for an Iron Condor. where is the threshold of fair pricing in an low volatility environment
I am not sure what you mean by fair pricing.
Do you mean what types of credits you should look for in a low IV environment?
You can get similar credits in low and high volatility environments, but the difference is that your strikes will be much closer to the stock price in low vol environments.
Fantastic research, you have no idea how much comfort it has given me now when entering Iron Condor trades. Well done! please cover more time period to make this study even better. Cheers~
Awesome study. Rare to find unbiased detailed information. Keep up the great work!
Chris, this content is money!! Pun intended... I know I'm viewing 4+ years after the original publishing, but the principles are still very much applicable. Thank you for sharing your extensive knowledge. ~M.
Could you address the cash (margin) requirements for each strategy? I feel like discussing net profit/loss looses context without discussing how much capital is tied up. Is this case, it may be negligent, but would like your input. Thanks again for your insightful videos!
I have been trying to figure out how to optimize my condor and credit spread management and this video is exactly what I needed. Thank you!!!
Amazing. Evidence based practice. Please do more of these!
Thanks for the comment! I will do more research-based videos in the future.
Yes please this helps us
Awesome stuff, it pretty much solidifies what Tom and Tony (Tastytrade) have been saying for years. 25-50% profit target and deal preferably in high vix environments. Well done buddy
That is not what the data shows, 25% management is terrible in high vix. You want a 30 delta ic and late profit taking in high iv. The 16 delta 25% is good in low iv, it is pretty safe and hopefully iv is up when the Condor is finished.
Id love to see this done for each SPY option trading day. Im gonna do it with my little 1.5 account
If you take closely,you will find a Bizarre fact, and that is unlike what have been told many times, there is a VIX range that results in poor and weak performance. We were all told that Higher VIX number results in better performance for Iron Condor, while in fact, the range between 17.5 to 23.5 has the worst possible outcome. This range is less than extreme high VIX, where VIX stands above 23.5. So, high VIX ( Vix between 17.5 to 23.5),in contrast with very High IV ( Vix>23..5) is where you should avoid trading. The result is poor and market has whipsawed.
Someone give this man a shield. I mean medal 🏅 thank you so much
This is gold. I hope there are more studies.
Very decent research, I do miss a few small points, like:
I do expect to see a significant drop in absolute profit when we compare the 'managing at 25%, 30 delta', to the 'managing at 50-70%, 16 delta'... Because I expect your losses (relative to the profits) for the 16 delta to be lower in this specific underlying... in fact, looking back at the averages, it seems about a 50% drop in profit for the 30 delta's compared to the 16 delta strategy (regardless of the fact that for 30 delta, managing at 25% is 'most profitable').
Assuming then a 50% drop in absolute profit, would make total sense to me.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is: showing some absolute profit numbers would allow to question 'what is the most profitable strategy all together for this underlying/situation'?
Showing what caused the most losses, might explain 'why is something the most profitable strategy all together?', and it may also give more context to why the IV impacts the results as it does.
My best guess would be: in this underlying (and considering the historical period you used), lots of tests (and losses) will occur on the call side:
- with 30 delta's you take most profits when managing early, because you'll limit the calls being tested, but then your commissions start eating into your profits and so your overall/absolute profit takes a dive. High IV allows for further strike prices for the same delta, and so since a 30 delta will manifest more, the IV had a way higher impact (compared to in a 16 delta strategy).
- in the 16 delta, I'd expect you have more room for the stockprice to expand, less tests on the call side, and so taking profits later will always outperform taking profits early, mainly based on commissions. It does taper off in the sense that when kept to expiration, you often start to see really big losses after the 70% of max profit region and so taking profits around 50% to 70% seems to be a good range to consider. Where you want to be in that range, as far as my understanding goes, seems to depend most on commissions:
- 70% being preferable the higher your commissions are (since less trades need to be made and losses are still manageable)
- 50% being the more preferable with lower commissions (since lower commissions allow for more trades to be made for the same money and managing early nearly always prevents bigger losses)
... so basically, as far as my own research goes, it's the trade-off between "managing early, costs money (in the form of commissions) and so it increases losses", but "managing early, prevents bigger losses and so it increases profits", and somewhere in between there is a sweet spot.
Mainly because for a 45 day cycle, 'winning trades' (on rough average for this underlying) will reach about 100% of max profit around 26 to 30 days . And so on rough average, keeping something on for longer than that period, you start to take on unnecessary 'time-risk' if you will, and statiscticly speaking, you're setting the door wide open for big losses of a trade that was most likely already doomed anyway.
So managing early is indeed a given, but knowing why seems even equally important, simply because not all underlying or situations are the same. And so we'll need to make choices about "what's a good strategy for this underlying or situation?" and to make good choices, you'll need to know the reasons why something is good or bad in a given situation... that's the small bits I miss, I would have loved to see if your research confirm/destroy the above assumptions about the losses being mainly on the call side and why IV helps with that.
Either way, it's one of the most decent researches I've seen in UA-cam so far.
I'll be sure to check your other videos and thank you for all your hard work!
Great Study Chris. Similar to the credit spread study, will you update this one to include the 2020 sell off? i am wondering if it will change somewhat.
Would I want to set a stop loss instead of rolling one side closer? I know you probably didnt want to get into that in this video.
That was excellent. Well done! I hope this helps people trading Iron Condors.
And you didn't talk about those drastic changes in rentability depending on the IV. What i gather from it:
If IV low: 16-delta condor, don't take loss, take profit at 50%. Very steady income. 40$P/L
If IV medium: Don't play condor. Rentability sucks.
If IV really high: 30-Delta, take also profit at 50%, don't take loss. 60$P/L
That's what the data say. How could manage your trades to improve it?
Thanks a lot by the way! Great vid :)
Very well done Chris! Excellent analytical approach to looking at the data.
Thank you, Daniel!
why does this video not have more views? blows my mind!
Loved the research! Thank you for taking the effort, I really appreciate it!
The Vix ones, i think the vix position when selling was the most important thing. The short ones probably sold as it cycled down, and longer ones caught it after a full cycle where the vix was again back up.
Where or how did you do this backtest pls?
What do you use to backtest the options?
I use Python programs to simulate options strategies and analyze the trade data. I have purchased historical options data that I use in the simulations.
So @projectoption, are these conclusions right?
1. It is always better to hold IC (16 delta) until expiration OR x% profit versus managing x% loss when trading 45 days?
2. And if you have no commissions taken for trades, it is simply best to not close options until expiration?
3. High volatility options will always profit more than lower volatility with IC.
This is exactly what I was looking for ! Thanks a ton bro !
Thanks Chris! Do you have a similar video for credit spreads?
Not exactly, but I have a credit spread trading plan video on the channel with some results of a systematic strategy.
What is the software that you backtest with plz ?
Chris. this was great stuff, I takes a lot time to understand the study, I mean there is so much material, you have really study it. This is what I like?
Thanks for the comment Tim!
Good job man, great vid to see a perspective on IC trading approach. Appreciate it
Thank you, Edgaras!
I'm glad to hear you found the video valuable.
Stay tuned for more!
-Chris
Great job on this study. Thank you
You're welcome! Thanks for leaving a comment.
-Chris
Great video. While you were normalising the time frame to 45 days you took a linear approach. The theta decay being exponential and having more impact towards the end of 45 days,won't it be better to normalise the 25% (roughly 15 days)or 50% profit (25 days) in an exponential way . Not sure just my thoughts
Great Video. Isn't there an some what inverse relationship to VIX . For example: Entering a trade with a high VIX potentially means over 30-45 days you would benefit from a drop in Vix. and vs versa. Shorter strikes with less IV "AFTER" the trade would. benefit you.
How did you backtest this (where did you find the data required to conduct this study)? Would like to play around with it myself :)
Hey! Your videos got me absolutely hooked on options trading. I haven't done any trades yet as I am still getting familiar with the entire topic and your videos help a lot! Thanks a lot! After watching this video some questions came up and was wondering if you could help me out with them.
1. How did you carry out this study? There's the data from? Did you use this option modeling software that you show in some of the videos?
2. Another point which confused me a bit is the influence of the VIX and winning rate/profibility of the trades. I thought selling an iron condors is a supposed to be a market neutral approach when the trades is profitable as long as it stays in a specific range. However, higher VIX levels imply declining SPY prices and thereby, the risk of leaving the iron condor's profitable price range should increase. This a quite counterintuitive. Did I miss something or is this the message of the video?
4. Did you backtest this strategy on the corona period or is the time period to short for a statistically representative study?
Thanks a lot again!
HOLY AMAZING CHARTS
Thank you! Shoutout to matplotlib :D
@@projectfinance looking into stocks, more particularly charts and data. (was a huge charts guy for crypto) I wish that instead of using VIX you could show the effectiveness of a strategy at different IV percentages or something that applies to a broader spectrum of stocks.
I would love for you to discuss the same topic on 0DTE! Amazon video
Nice and insightful study!
It would be interesting to see the performances by year with an equity curve to have a better idea about the necessary cash to run this strategy in a daily basis for several years.
Thank you so much for the information, really appreciate your hard work on compiling such difficult data!! Merry Christmas! May God Bless You 😇
You're welcome and thank you for watching! I hope your Holiday season was great!
Apologies for my ignorance, but when you say VIX do you mean the price of the CBOE volatility index or is there some VIX number on a per underlying basis? As in, does SPY have a different VIX than AAPL for example?
Nice video, can we include vix filter to increase win rate as you did in your other video of credit put spread. What will be win rate if we put vix cap of 30?
This video is the best overall study review
Awesome study. Keep up the great work!
I'm having trouble determining the color representation portion of the graph. Is anything that's not green to be taken as a loss?
Thank you, Chris, for such awesome content! What you have done is quite exciting. I'm tempted to do have some fun like you but don't know what would be a good backtesting tool. Quantopian/zipline/backtrader doesn't support options. Does tastyworks have such capability?
This is a fantastic video. Newly subscribed. You do a fantastic job of presenting unbiased information. No bs or claims to get rich.
The research did make me wonder to what degree the findings are statistically significant. For example I noticed that a big portion of the 17-23.5 IV bucket was actually unprofitable. Could be a signal or could be noise. Perhaps over the last 10 years by chance, that IV bucket just happened to occur right before times of significant market upswing/downswing, causing the IC to lose.
What does 30 delta vs 16 delta condor? Is it the difference between strikes? and if so which ones?
Great job, I really enjoyed your presentation. I quickly looked up the nearest SPY 16/5 delta (6/26) and was surprised to see that the legs were unbalanced. My example shows a $19 put spread and $8 call spread, with a VIX of 16.21 at close. Is that unusual?
IRON CONDOR - net credit $2.09
Buy to Open SPY 16 AUG '19 $253 PUT
(-.05 delta)
Sell to Open SPY 16 AUG '19 $272 PUT (-.16 delta)
- and -
Sell to Open SPY 16 AUG '19 $304 CALL (.16 delta)
Buy to Open SPY 16 AUG '19 $312 CALL
(.05 delta)
This would effect position sizing. How should this be handled?
Hey Chris,
I’ve 2 CRM iron condor experience date 9-4-2020 trading at @278.50 and received $4.53 credit and wanted to exercise 2 $235 call options? Reset of options will go worthless?
Buy $175 put - 0.03 (current value)
Sell $195 put - 0.01
Sell $215 call - 61.43
But $235 call - 41.53
What’s best approach I can do here to make profit?
Hey Chris I am from India, n trade in Indian Markets but not allowed to trade outside markets, want to open account with tasty trades, are we allowed?
Maybe I am looking at this wrong , but with the deltas you mentioned on the SPX , those are huge spreads . Way more points than i would ever do . 16 to 5 delta 45 DTE is a 280 point wide spread . What am doing wrong?
I would like to see an update of these approaches post-covid. My comment is posted on 9/25/2021.
Seeing the charts now from Feb 2020, I'd probably close out the call side for a net credit, roll out the short put with the same strike, roll the long put out and up, hopefully without a net debit. Although, I wonder if I would have actually done that at the time
What does 16 delta IC mean ? Is that the sum of all four deltas from the four strike prices ? Does the 16 delta IC have wider base or shorter base than the 30 delta IC?
I'm really interested to see results for other underlying stocks. Especially when it comes to VIX.
You did not discuss which if any of the management technique was profitable in the end.
what does delta mean in relation to an actual number. ie; is 16 delta 16 points?
sir, thank you for this kind of research....honestly this is too much great information....
You're welcome and thanks for watching!
Fantastic summary. Thankyou!
Hey I understood everything in the video but i am having trouble with what you mean by "win rate" does that mean that the iron condor was within the range of the price movement you want the stock price to be within and you would call that a "win" and a "non win rate" would be when the stock price closed either in one of the two ranges of the two spreads.
By win rate I meant the percentage of trades that had a profit when they were closed.
Wow. Thank for this study
Great job on this. Thank you for sharing it!
Thank you Chris. Amazing work phew~~
Could someone explain me this:
When setting up a 30 delta condor, in a high IV envronment, the highest return is when you let it run its course, without taking loss or profits. by, like a lot. there is a difference of 80$ in P/L compared with the same condor in a low IV environment.
Why is that so? Are the premium at those volatility levels that high? Is it IV crush speaking?
I mean, high volatility, high swings, you would expect your condor to be ITM a lot of times, yet there is this very very high difference in rentability. From 65$P/L to -15$P/L. So strange.
Thanks a lot for the vid btw!
I think IV crush has a lot to do with it. If you look at historical VIX price and take peaks, then 45 days after peak it tends to drop by 40% or more. Volatility on SPY tends to spike and then decay rapidly and reliably, so giving it the full 45 days makes sense.
Hey Chris very handy..thanks for sharing your study. One quick question; any reason you chose 16 and 30 delta? Are they preferred when entering IC?
Hi Ankit,
0.1616 delta options are at the "one standard deviation" level, meaning they have a 16% chance of expiring in-the-money and therefore an 84% chance of expiring out-of-the-money/worthless. If a trader sells the 0.16-delta call and 0.16-delta put, the implied probability of the stock price being in-between the two strikes at expiration is about 68%, which encompasses "one standard deviation" around the mean, which is the stock price at the time of entering the trade in the context of options trading.
This website does a good job of explaining:
www.investopedia.com/terms/s/standarddeviation.asp
Sorry my English isn't so good enough to understand everything you said , could pls write a briefing or tell me what's the best vix iv rank and delta for iron condors thank you so much
You should use median rather than avg since in the presence of skewed data the mean no longer represents what is commonly understood to be the center
Thank you Chris, this piece is awesome!
Glad you like it!
When i sell a iron condor. Does the buy have to also look for iron condor contracts or iron condor is like 4 trade, it can be bought by someone who's only looking to buy 1 of the leg?
It "can be bought by someone who's only looking to buy 1 of the leg?"
@@pingogpong I mean can it
I believe each option leg (and even contract) is sold separately to whatever buyer. Most brokers will just group them up for you as a seller so you can track them more easily.
This is already beyond insane levels of content, for free, at our disposal on demand. That's ludicrous, if you think about it. However, what would make this even more valuable to me and I think for many other traders, is an analysis of different assets that have had different performances than the ever-bullish SPY.
The fact that high VIX environments have done well for the trades may be related to the fact that the iron condor has a bullish tendency from its short leg being more valuable and therefore "not going down" being rewarded more than "not going up".
Is this correct? What are your thoughts?
I would love to see a historical analysis of the wheel strategy popular among the Theta Gang crowd.
The wheel strategy is highly dependent on the choice of underlying which makes it almost impossible to backtest. I've never seen a purely mechanical criteria for selecting which stock to wheel. It's usually, "this looks like a good stock to wheel". Having said that, I mainly trade the wheel and bull put spreads and I'm up about 50% in 5 months. Despite that, I want to start selling more bear call spreads because I'm always worried about a big market correction.
This video is really interesting.
Now knowing that this strategy performs best when the VIX is above the 75th percentile,
with the latest events (covid-19) and VIX skyrocketing to 80, it would be interesting to know how this strategy performs in extreme volatility with additional buckets, say 70th, 80th and 90th percentiles of VIX level at the time of the trade entry. I am not sure selling an Iron Condor at these extreme levels would be the most profitable time for that?
What do you think?
Thanks!
Hi there and thanks for the comment! When the VIX was at 80 I was under the impression that it was not a good time for selling options. Specifically neutral strategies like strangles / iron condors. However, realized volatility has somewhat tapered off since then (bringing the VIX with it) and I think it's a little better now. But overall, my philosophy is that it's not a good idea to sell market-neutral options strategies during times of extremely high VIX. The realized volatility is so high that it's very easy to get steamrolled by a huge daily move. Just my opinion but I hope this helps!
Great study!
You're on the right track and the info is interesting, but...
A question re methodology of the research;
Did you use EOD data or did you strip out the intraday Hi, both for VIX and price, to determine p/l scenarios?
The latter would be the only way to get accurate data.
You bring up a good point!
The data is all EOD and doesn't include the intraday high of the VIX when splitting up the trades into IV buckets.
The option data is EOD as well. We'd need intraday option data to get the best picture of historical P/L figures for each of the iron condor variations tested.
-Chris
Thanks for replying.
It will change not only the P/L, but more importantly, the W/L ratio. Speaking from 10 years options trading experience and having performed back-testing with intraday OHLC historical options data.
That being said, there are times when even the best available data is not accurate, as the OHLC data only reflects actual trade execution price, and the actual bid/ask at times is substantially different. I know from experience as I DDE'd and recorded OHLC bid/ask, (not just the executed price) live SPY options data from TOS for years to use in my own back-test analyzing :-)
Didn't bother with recording the greeks as I was only interested in price.
imho you owe it to yourself to do the same back-test with the intraday OHLC. The last year's intrady OHLC is all you need to get a true picture of any strat for SPY.
Post a video if you do.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I can see how the OHLC data would be very helpful and give a better picture of option P/L for a strategy using a single option.
How would you apply OHLC data to a multi-leg strategy like an iron condor? We don't know when the high or low price for an option occurred so it would be incorrect to try and estimate an iron condors price using the high or low option price values. It seems to me that only the open or close prices would be accurate for estimating the price of multi-leg strategies.
eezeepeezee. IC are simply single options bought or sold as a group at the same time. You can use a simple spreadsheet to calculate the aggregate price of the multiple strikes of any strat, at any point in time, if you have the intraday data. Done it thousands of times.
Something that may interest you. Beware of brokerages bid/ask for multi leg strats. Just because you get a fill at a certain IC price does not mean that you got each fill at the true b/a for each of the separate strikes, because you are basically buying a basket of 4 strikes at a certain total price.. You can end up with one side way too expensive, and the other way too cheap, which makes it very difficult to actually profit. Tricky brokerages. Find out if your brokerage is ever counterparty to your trade.
Consider the following as an example fo how intraday data would be applied to an IC:
You enter trade on XYZ with IC targeting 49% of max profit, in this case $200. Intraday, the price action may move thru this point once or multiple times. But EOD leads you to believe that the closest it got to your exit point was 35%. Happens quite frequently, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
So EOD data would lead you to believe that the strat was not as reliable as was actually the case. Otoh, the opposite is also true, intraday might go against you enough that your stop is triggered and you would most likely have exited the trade.
Either way, EOD data, even for stocks, gives you at best a ballpark guesstimate. Not good enough for a serious trader. Unless of course your strat is a simple hold to exp, or hold for a certain period of days, also known as a roll the dice strat.
Thank you for this data! It’s exactly what I’ve been searching for.
You're welcome! Glad it was helpful.
I’m interested in broken wing butterflys but having trouble finding info about strategies and when to place them. I was thinking maybe a put bwb on extremely oversold underlyings. What do you think?
I love the put BWB strategy. I can't tell you when you should personally use it, but it does have less upside risk compared to downside risk, assuming your long put spread has a narrower strike width than the short put spread (example: buy the 100 put, sell 2x 95 puts, buy 1x 85 put; long put spread width = $5; short put spread width = $10).
Thank you!
You're Welcome! I just spent a ton of time creating an Options Trading for Beginners PDF (170+ pages now) that includes my best explanations/visuals explaining key options trading concepts and strategies. Check it out: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g7d402wnapqexq344ct73/options-trading-for-beginners-aug15-v1.pdf?rlkey=dort61xyaz1rubndbwbqmhd5i&dl=0
If you want updates to the PDF over the coming months/additional learning resources, consider dropping your email on the page here: geni.us/options-trading-pdf
I squinted so hard to understand that I had a vision in the fourth dimension.
Perfect, Thx
Great video thank you
You're welcome! Thanks for watching.
This is fantastic, thank you!
Thank you!
I was about to fund my account and notice that no backtesting facility as in TOS
Actually can achieve this with ‘On-demand’ function in TOS (not available on paper money account)
Isnt it an important variable missing here? if have a win rate of 99%, but I win only a dollar in each win and lose 1000 dollars in every lose. how important is the win rate?
Can you explain 16-delta and 30-delta please?
The strategies were setup by selecting the options with delta values nearest to 16 and 30 for each separate test.
The delta of an option is how much the option's price is expected to change with a $1 change in the stock price. Delta is also used as an estimate of the option's probability of expiring in-the-money.
So, a delta of 16 means the option has an approximate 16% chance of expiring in-the-money. A delta of 30 means the option has an approximate 30% chance of expiring in-the-money.
When comparing the two setups, the 30-delta options are closer to the current stock price compared to the 16-delta options (explaining why the 30-delta options have a higher probability of expiring in-the-money).
I hope this helps!
-Chris
Yes, ty!
Hey Chris, great study. I have access to some fairly high end statistical software which could be helpful in determining better correlations between VIX, profitability, etc.. I'm very willing to run the regressions for you if you send me the data. Thanks!
option data costs a lot of money!
Does "managing loosers" (with different rolls) helps the PnL in some way vs commissions to do so?
Little remark: 25 (or other number) on Vixx (or other "products") isn't the same when it's a 6-month-High or "just high" (around median)
Thank a lot.
Love this
Thank you!
More study please
very good
Thank you!
This is so cool!
Try using IVR instead of just IV
He's doing the study specifically on the SPY, so the VIX is a good indication of it's implied volatility. That's why he specifically used 14, 17.5, and 23.5. For example, VIX>23.5 is the same as a high IV rank/percentile, whereas VIX
When I look at 16 delta 5 delta iron condors, I'm looking at nearly $30 wide iron condors, yet you are netting ~$30 a trade? Something is off...
edit: this means risking $3,000 to make $30
His numbers are average profit after all trades. There the losses were already deducted.
this is very good stuff, thank you.
Thank you, Herman!
Interesting that trying to mitigate losses by bailing out at 100% loss doesn't revive expected returns at all..
Definitely! I'm wondering if that has to do with the higher frequency of hitting a 100% loss at some point during an open contract. I know that when I have had an IC where the underlying moves consistently in one direction for a few days, my losses tend to get around that 100% loss level way before the underlying hits the ITM price. If your rule was "always get out at 100% loss", it would likely occur many times for contracts in which the IC would have ended up being a winning trade at expiration had you held until expiration.
Chris, something is wrong with this research. How can you make a 200% and 300% stop loss strategy, when Iron condors have , by defition, limited losses ?? If this was an unlimited loss strategy like a short straddle or a short strangle, then I understand, but for limited loss strategies like condors and iron flies, loss never goes above 100% of net premium received !!
Hi M TELYA,
You are confusing the percentage loss on the premium received with the percentage of the maximum loss potential.
If an iron condor collects $1.00 and can lose $9.00, and the iron condor price rises to $2.00, that would be a 100% loss on the premium received.
If the iron condor price rises to $3.00 or $4.00, those would be 200% and 300% losses on the premium received, respectively.
If the iron condor can lose a maximum of $9.00 (for instance, a $10-wide iron condor that is sold for $1.00), then the iron condor can lose 800% of the $1.00 premium received.
If I was calculating the losses based on the maximum loss potential, then, of course, the losses could never exceed 100% of the maximum loss potential.
I hope this clears things up!
-Chris
pure gold stuff
Can you please run a backtest and share it out again with public with a 10 delta strike on zero day to expiration with $SPX
It's really tough getting worthwhile premium at 16 delta, at least in my experience.
I agree. The position typically has far more risk than reward when selling iron condors with the short strikes at 16-delta. Position management is key to avoid realizing the big drawdowns.
Do you have a standard metric for adjustment in terms of delta and DTE? Lately one side on a new position is suddenly at .50 delta when I sold at .20. I got burned overreacting a couple of times and just trying to adopt a strategy for ultra volatile markets.