Friday (4/3/20) was an interesting day in the S&P500 market due to its rotating action around the 2500 strike. We had several data points that led us to believe that this strike would be key to the action on Friday and wanted to highlight those points. Most of these charts are only available to subscribers […]
Market Analysis
Still Question the Impact of Options?
This past March monthly OPEX was one of the largest on record, and featured very large deep in the money put positions. We believed this was a key driver of market volatility in early March, and the change in markets following expiration has been drastic. March OPEX was on 3/20, and it was the following […]
Zero Gamma = Zero Gravity
We posted a few days ago about the “right” tail risk and the possibility of a market rally. In a note to subscribers we added to this, suggesting the market may be in an airpocket. Specifically: “zero gravity”. Most of you are probably familiar with those flights which take you to the edge of space […]
Corona Market: Reviewing Right Tail Risk
This is being written just before the 3/26 unemployment data release which is forecasting as much as 2 million unemployment due to the economic shutdown related to Coronavirus. There is also a Stimulus Bill “pending“. While we are all aware of the downside risks here, here is a scenario for a major move to the […]
The Case for Reduced Price Volatility
Our current view of markets is that we should see reduced price volatility following the large March expiration that took place this past Friday (3/20). One of the features of this expiration was a large number of in the money puts, which possibly created several billion in deltas for options dealers to hedge. As dealers […]
Nomuras Pre-OPEX Market View
We wrote a few days ago about the importance of tomorrows 3/20 options expiration because of 1) its sheer size and 2) its amount of deep in the money puts. ZeroHedge adds to this sentiment with some notes from Nomuras McElligott: this “large decline in the gamma post-expiration” should allow markets to pivot back to […]
RealVision: Excellent Gamma Discussion
Market Makers & Coronavirus: The Mechanics of a Market Sell-Off How do sell-offs actually happen? With the S&P 500 selling off hard and fast, Hari Krishnan, fund manager at Doherty Advisors, breaks down the mechanics of market meltdowns. Krishnan explains the role of different institutional players like market-makers and drills down on the individual components […]
The Large 3/20 Options Expiration
Options expiration for this Friday 3/20 is getting a lot of attention because it is so large. It may also hold the key to a major change in our “negative gamma” situation. As you can see markets remain in negative gamma territory unless we move up towards 3100-3150 in the SPX. The other way we […]
What Happens if Options Exchange Close?
Global markets are a mess, and there seems to a be a distinct possibility that we see a market closure of some type before this calm. The NYSE and CBOE are closing their trading floors (where humans congregate) due to coronavirus but their electronic exchanges will remain open. Here is the quick summary if you […]
When Might this Volatility End?
We have been targeting next weeks OPEX 3/20 as a key time in this “volatility cycle” as there is very large open interest. As that open interest is closed or rolled it may allow some calm as call options are re-struck closer to at-the-money and put options are rolled out and down. This could effectively […]