Answer:  I’m not sure I agree that Iron condors are good for uptrending markets.  Iron condors have both a short put and a short call and we want the underlying stock or index to stay above the short Put and below the short Call through expiration.   In general, with the 90% probability type of credit spreads that we open, we can handle the underlying index moving around 9%, but that’s about it….so it could be trending UP or DOWN, up to 9%,  but after this we’ll have to make an adjustment.

Right now, we’re not feeling comfortable in opening the June bear call spread since the market recently corrected 15% and it could rally hard if some good news comes in.  We just don’t know, but when a market pulls back so hard, it could also rally hard.  This is where I’m using more of the volume based indicators to help me gauge the prevailing trend and to predict trend reversals.  I’m feeling more comfortable in opening the June bull put spreads right now on the Russell 2000 index, RUT, as long as they are down several strike prices below the 200 day SMA and below the Feb low.

Answering your questions specifically, when sentiment/fear makes a market correct, like it just did where it recently pulled-back 15%, this is when we make some of our best returns;  and we primarily focus on one side, the bottom bull put spread.  If the volume based indicators continue to show choppiness over the next week, where it’s not showing a “go long” signal, we might consider opening the top spread….but not sure yet.

Answer:   You could if you wish, but I don’t recommend it.  In order to buy back the short leg it will be really expensive.  And, I’m not convinced that the market will climb any more.  On the other hand, if I thought the market was going to continue to rally for the next week, this would be a good strategy.  Let’s look at the numbers as of March 11, 2010:

 To close out the RUT Mar 680/690 bear call spread it would cost a debit of $2.55

To BTC the 680 leg it would cost a debit of $3.85

To STC the 690 leg we would collect $1.30 credit

3.85-1.30=$2.55

 You can see that if we just hold onto the long 690 call, it will cost us $1.30 and the RUT would need to continue to rally in order for this long 690 call to pay off.

Response:   I would wait a touch longer before jumping into the bear call spreads, if at all.   For the RUT, it would be wise to set our short call at 650 or higher, which is the Jan high.  It’s pretty easy to get burned on the top spreads…so we need to be careful. 

Question:  But it’s interesting to notice with today’s market that even though the DOW is up almost 200 points, NASDAQ 30+ point, and S&P 500 is up 16+, the Call options on these indexes aren’t moving up much.   Why isn’t there much premium on these call options?

Response:    A lot of it comes down to supply and demand and currently there are few speculators that want to buy calls on the major indexes, and rightly so since we might still be in a correction, so the premiums that they are willing to pay are low.   Premiums are low anyway for OTM calls, especially when we’re down to the last 10 days of trade or less before expiration.    We know that  it’s difficult to push a boulder uphill and if we ‘re able to move it, it will move slowly;  however, if we let go it will start to roll down the hill quickly and momentum will build as gravity takes over.   Because the stock market is similar to a boulder on a hill,  we can charge the speculators more for Puts because there is more potential to make money on them if the market has a correction, versus the lower premiums that we are able to charge for the Calls.

Buy to open RUT May 560 call 

Sell to open RUT May 550 call  -   For a credit of 40 to 65 cents.

Then it goes on to say:   If the market continues to climb, and if this spread is now filling for 68 cents, for example, we would suspend fills on this spread, per the directions in the advisory above, and we would ”click-up” to the RUT May 560/570 bear call spread and repeat the process of “collecting” premium on the days where it’s filling for at least 40 cents, but no more than 65 cents.   But are you not then overlapping this new spread with the previous one and thus opening up a 20 point spread of May 550 / May 570 ? The May 560s will cancel each other out.  Would this then require trading in 2 separate accounts ?

Response:    Yes, when trading 10 point wide spreads, like what we do with the RUT, we need two accounts.  That is, we need two accounts if we want to be nimble and click-up and click-down our strike prices as the underlying index moves, which ultimately reduces our risk.  Some credit spread traders/newsletters don’t click-up/down during the month, which is rather unfortunate because this increases risk, and you wouldn’t need two accounts.  Per how we do it at MCTO, we do recommend for our subscribers to have two accounts. 

One way of eliminating the need for two accounts is to mix RUT credit spreads with IWM credit spreads.   The IWM is an ETF that tracks at 1/10^thof the RUT.   For example, if we recommend the RUT 570/580 bear call spread (which is a 10 point wide spread…i.e. 10 points between the buy and sell legs), the IWM 57/59 bear call spread (which is a 2 point wide spread) has almost the same risk/reward profile.  So for example, let’s say we first open the RUT 570/580 bear call spread.  One week later the RUT rallies and we decide that we need to click-up to move further away from the underlying index.  Because we want to do our best to maintain 10 point wide spreads in our account, we shouldn’t put the RUT 580/590 into the same account that already has the RUT 570/580 since this would create a RUT 570/590 bear call spread, which is 20 points wide.  So an option is to put the IWM 58/60 bear call spread into the account.  Then if the RUT continues to rally and we decide to click-up again, we go back to the RUT and put the RUT 590/600 in the account…..etc.  We also call this “layering” our spreads.  The disadvantage, however, of opening 2 point wide spreads is that higher commissions eat into our returns, so it’s best to use low cost options brokers, like eOption or TradeKing.

Response:   Absolutely.  I think we should pick up some premium within 2 hours from when the unemployment numbers are released this Friday.   If the market rallies, let’s open some bear call spreads, and  if the market sells off, let’s open some bull put spreads.  Once the market moves, it’s my guess that the market will stabilize rather quickly as investors/traders/money mangers await Q4 earnings that start to come out next week.   I’ll send out an advisory tomorrow, Thursday, with my thoughts on strike price placement.

Response:   I think I’m going to wait for the unemployment number to come out on Friday.  I believe there is a reasonable chance the number will be good, possibly showing the first positive jobs growth in 23 months, and the market could have a strong UP day giving us one last opportunity to bring in some premium on the top spread.   I’m hesitating to bring in more RUT 670/680s and would prefer to click-up and bring in some 680/690s.

Answer:    So far we’ve placed 4 options trades in the auto trade accounts for the January cycle.  Three, 2 point wide SPY credit spreads and one, 10 point wide SPX credit spread options.   We  send a maximum of 5 trade alerts each month that uses 100% of your cash, and so far we’ve sent four.  (at least our goal is to send 5 auto-trade trade alerts, but sometimes we’re not able to invest all of your cash for a particular month….like in the last 3 months due to how the market has been behaving)

The reason we’re focusing on the S&P 500 index this month is that we’re a little concerned that the RUT might spike-up to play “catch-up”….so we’re under weighting on the RUT and over weighting on the big-cap S&P 500 index this month.  Because the US dollar is strengthening, this also will put a little downward pressure on the big-cap stocks that reside in the S&P 500 index, which gives us a higher probability that our top January bear call spreads will expire profitable.

Per the topic of diversification, because these are indexes, they are already diversified since each is composed of hundreds, if not thousands of stocks.   The big cap index does move a little differently as compared to how the mid-cap and small-cap indexes move, so this does provide a small amount of diversification, but we don’t want to use all of these indexes just for the sake of trying to diversify.  We  look at each index as a independent trading vehicle and if the technicals, strike price placement and levels of premium look good offering us a decent risk/reward profile, we’ll open the trade.    In the process,  if we’re able to open credit spreads on multiple indexes giving us a little bit of added diversification, all the better.

Answer:   Yes, you can use our analysis and signals on the RUT (Russell 2000 Index) to trade the IWM (and ETF that tracks at 1/10th the value of the Russell 2000 index – RUT).     Just make sure you select the same short leg.    For example, if we issue a signal to trade the RUT Dec 650/660 bear call spread, you could also trade the IWM Dec 65/67 bear call spread and the risk/reward profile for both trades is very similar.   It’s best to stick with 2 point or 3 point spreads on the IWM.   (i.e. either a 65/67 or 65/68 bear call spread….per this example)    For more on why we use 2 point or 3 point spreads on the ETFs, please go to the Monthly Cash Thru Options Learning Center at  http://www.monthlycashthruoptions.com/LearningCenter.htm   and read the entry  “why we usually open 3 point spreads on the SPY”

Question:  Which one do you prefer to write credit spread and iron condor options against….the SPY or IWM?

Answer:    Both have similar risk/reward profiles.   Sometimes, however, we can get better placement for our strike prices on the IWM, but it does vary from month to month.  That’s why we have to analyze the trades on each underlying ETF each month to see which underlying offers the best placement of our strike prices.

Today is the last day for our November RUT bull put credit spreads where they cease to trade today after the close and they settle tomorrow, Friday.   No action is required, assuming you have the RUT Nov 530/540 bull put spread, or lower.   Let’s let them settle tomorrow and expire worthless.

Per the SPY option trades, they will continue to trade through tomorrow, Friday, and we’ll keep you posted.  So far they are safe and no action is required, assuming you have the SPY Nov 100/102 bull put spread, or lower.

And of course all of our top Nov bear call spreads are safe.  Let’s hold onto everything and let them expire worthless.

Response:     I understand your concern.  In general, because we open very far out-of-the-money (OTM) 90% probability credit spreads, we tend to have enough time to close out our bull put spreads and/or make adjustments to cut our losses in the case of a market meltdown.   99% of the time, even when the market pulls back hard, we have time to get out and cut our losses, and we have a 5 year track record of keeping our losses below 10%, which is pretty good.

However, the October 2008 crash was different where we unfortunately ended up riding a few of our spreads down to where they went in-the-money (ITM).  This happened because in addition to the major indexes violently selling-off 3% to 5% per day, volatility also rapidly spiked up to record levels making it very expensive to get out of our spreads. We therefore decided to hold-on hoping for a short lived bounce so we could get out, but unfortunately that never happened as we all know.   So during the Oct ‘08 crash, we actually made very few adjustments to our bull put spreads, thus they they went ITM, and we were able to eventually get back 65% of our original risk capital purely by rolling our ITM spreads month-to-month, rolling down the strike prices of our spreads lower and lower each month, and waiting for the market to rebound a little.   This Oct ‘08 crash gave the MCTO team a good case study on what it takes to roll spreads and to recover a large % of risk capital after a massive crash.  It was painful to go through, but I’m somewhat happy that it forced me and my partner to become experts on rolling in order to preserve capital during a crash.

So per your concern of a one day, 15% or greater stock market crash where our bull put spreads immediately go ITM, we have a lot of experience with what it takes to roll spreads and we are confident that we can get back at least 60% of our risk capital, and possibly as high as 80% of our risk capital, depending on how fast the markets recover.  (An example of an event that would cause a one-day 15% crash is something similar to 9/11, or worse, the detonation of a  nuclear device in a US city by terrorists, which is the type of event that could take the markets down 15% or more in a single day)

Please keep this in mind as you interview other credit spread advisory publishers. Very few, if any, credit spread newsletter editors have experience in rolling.  Most don’t bother with rolling and just throw in the towel and let their subscribers lose 100% of their risk capital.  For us, that’s unacceptable and we fight to the end to preserve our capital using advanced rolling techniques that we practiced and refined during the Oct ‘08 crash.