Month: January 2024

Thesis: find boring ETFs that don’t move much, sell Iron Condors on them. What underlying doesn’t move much? Treasury bonds. What ETFs cover government bonds? These have daily average volumes of >2,000,000 shares:BIL, GOVT, IEF, IEI, SGOV, SHV, SHY, SPTI, SPTL, TFLO, TLT, USFR, VGIT, VGLT, VGSHTMF/TMV (3x), TYD/TYO (3x) I’ve argued before that for spreads you don’t need leverage, so exclude those.Some don’t have options, and some that do are thinly-traded, so exclude those, then sort by average volume:TLT, …

Read More

As I come across things in reading forums or researching, this’ll be a place to jot down ideas. Mainly trading ideas, but anything really. The Spintwig backtest of SPY Vertical Put Spreads with various parameters is interesting. I’d always heard about it, but didn’t find it till today, 1/18/24. I don’t trade SPY (or the indices in general), but some interesting observations in it. One is that being short at 16Δ is in some ways better than 30Δ (less volatility, …

Read More

Where selling option time premium meets momentum. It’s Tuesday, 1/16/24. A lot of back-story in these first paragraphs, but if you want to jump to the trading details, skip down to Trading Plan. I’m 2 years from retirement and about 2 years ago started seriously looking for a way to earn just 10% per year on what should be a nest egg of almost $1M. 100k/yr from that plus a pension about a third of that, plus Social Security some …

Read More

Playing around with 1- or 0-DTE call credit spreads far OTM. $1 wide unless noted. Sorted shortest to longest time-in-trade. All returns are net of fees.