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This is going to be a massive Expiry, with the highest Open Interest position ever.
January 14, 2021, 06:48:03 PM
Deribit just added the 400K call strike!
Quote We've added the $BTC 400K strike in the Dec21 expiry! 🚀 https://twitter.com/DeribitExchange/status/1349566146341605376?s=20Send tweet! Wow! Actually, this strike has already been quite successful: already 67.5 lots exchanged: You can spot also a block trade of 50 options. What if Bitcoin expires above 403069 on Dec 31, 2021 (350 days left?) the leverage is astonishing! Also, given the extremely high implied volatility, the delta is not so tiny: 15% is something that is going to move in your portfolio! Of course, this is not a surprise: the options market has been extremely successful in this last leg up and recorded incredible volumes: Options volume have been steadily rising, with may exchanges with very high volumes, now almost comparable with the ones registered in the future market. December 20, 2020, 06:20:45 PM
I'm playing on the testnet and have some difficulties with understanding. Can someone take one example from my transaction log and trade history and explain to me how to interpret it? I generally understand the mechanism behind buying/selling calls and puts (thanks to fillippone) but some parameters are a bit confusing to me. What I was really hoping to see after maturity is the amount of premium I paid, the price at maturity and my profit or lose. But I'm not sure which parameter shows that. Transaction log Trade History Deribit has a slightly different working compared to other exchanges. First of all you should order your transactions log according to time, as I have the strong suspect it is not order with this criterium. Secondly in testate you are given a deposit of 10 BTC you can use to simulate your strategies. Then you can use those coins to trade: you buy an option and you do an "open trade" and when you sell it it is a "close trade". When you buy an option the ASK price + Fee are taken away from your balance. Your equity then becomes equal to the balance + the mark value of the option. When you decide to close the trade the opposite happens: you do the opposite sign operation on the option (sell, in this case), and the premium less fees are added to your balance, while the mark value of the option is substacted from the equity value. The exchange forces you to sell when doing the expiry of an options. Your Final P&L is then the final amount of the portfolio. The P&L on a single option is basically the sum of the trades. It might be counterintuitive, but the system is based on a "Mark to market" approach: the P&L on the single deal is irrelevant, as the only relevant thing is the final P&L of the book. December 18, 2020, 10:13:33 AM
The rally and the recent volatility gave space to Deribit to include higher strike options to their market:
I think that, apart for obvious marketing purpose, they wait for the option to have a delta of ,say, 1% before listing them. Who would trade a 0% delta option? i.e. an option that doesn't change her value with the price of the underlying? So we now see this evocative 100,000 strike call on September 2021 (expiry date 24 September 2021, the longest available expiry on Deribit). Let's look at the screen: We see that this option quotes 3.83c bid to 4.1c, implied vol around 100% and a delta of 12%. A 12% delta, means that for every dollar in the underlying level, the call moves in the same direction of 12% of such move, 12c. Of course this gives the option a very high leverage, as with the initial cash amount (premium + collateral) we would spend for, say 1 BTC, we can gain a bigger exposure to BTC movements. This means those deep OTM options are more a gambling tool than a proper hedging tool. Also the idea of selling those to cash in the premium expose to a potentially unlimited loss for a less than 4% premium upfont. I think the risk/reward scenario is too adverse. Also the liquidity is not great. The book is quite empty at the moment: Exiting at the wrong time could hinder the whole strategy, as on those very illiquid strikes market makers usually "remeber" the trades, and so they are quite good at "skewing" the markets against the customers. December 14, 2020, 07:30:04 AM
I think your post might make a better case against using deribit. I use LedgerX -- I don't use deribit because it's not physically delivered, doesn't allow US customers, etc. For the same reason you cannot use Deribit, I cannot use LedgerX. I am not an US residents, and I have by no mean way of accessing that market (I might be an NFA accredited individual, but this would expose to a number of opsec concerns). So, for this pure theoretical discussion, I willl stick to Deribit, even if I do share your views toward the physical delivery exercise style. This highlights why its not very useful to consider a position without its hedges or what its hedging. Agree, this is actually not financial advice, that I think you don't need from me (at least not on a public thread on an anonymous base), but pure theoretical speculation applying the concepts we learnt on this thread on a practical case. The positions I take are a bit wider than you assume-- $7.5k, 5k, or 2k strikes on the put side (which I try to get a premium comparable to a 15-20%/yr on the collateral, depending on the strike/date), and I'm getting more on the call side than you expected: E.g. recent trades have me receiving $2,699/BTC for JUN2021 50k, $6,985/BTC for DEC2021 35k, and $4920/BTC for DEC2021 50K, to give some examples. Thanks for the detail, however I don't understand how you can get more premium on a wider position. We are quite close to the historical maximum, so I think you sold those options with an higher implied volatility or with a greater time value (you might have done those trades a few months ago, maybe? At the moment an hypothetical JUN21 50K CALL would trade for 810 USD or a SEP 21 50K call would trade for 1600 USD. Getting to 2,700 USD on the JUN21 50K CALL would imply a 133% on IV or a 108% on the SEP21 50K CALL. Quite difficult right now, at least on Deribit, even though I think LedgerX and Deribit quotes must be pretty aligned. So lets look at the value at expiration of a position consisting of {2 BTC, -1BTC 35k DEC2021 call, -1BTC 5k DEC2021 put} using some recent trade prices, and compare that to just hodl the same 2 BTC: In exchange for diminished returns over a BTC price of $42,866, the position gets increased value at all lower prices. Again it is absolutely down to personal preferences, but I see a very high asymmetry on this trade: keeping the USD as main numeraire of the trade, the loss is ee on the case of a moon scenario is orders of magnitude bigger than the benefit in case of a crash (which is ultimately due to the cashed premium). But, as you correctly said, it is down to the global portfolio allocation, and risk preferences. All this to conclude that there is not a way to determine which is the superior strategy. <...> This is not correct.Under a more conservative model -- using the derivative of delta at the options premium to get the assignment odds under black-scholes
The delta of the Black and Scholes model is not the probability of getting in-the-money. There are a few ways of explaining this:
The way I see it, owning Bitcoin on an ongoing basis is a massive bet for and against a collection of black swans: This is the best part of your post, and I couldn't agree more. An hedge against a black swan, is the reason I first bought Bitcoin, as I explained in my interview. Aside, I did some image processing magic and managed to make a 'flatter' projection of my bookshelves. This is the second best part of your post! December 09, 2020, 05:08:15 PM
...I don't use deribit because it's not physically delivered,... People disregard this as if it means nothing when in fact it means everything!I agree, this deserves more elaboration. Options exist in "physically delivered" and "cash settled" form. Physically delivered works basically like what you would imagine an option to work: To write a call on a Bitcoin someone posts a Bitcoin and writes a contract. At maturity, whomever owns the contract can opt to pay the strike and get the Bitcoin. (Same thing for selling calls, but they'd post dollars and if it gets assigned the contract holder pays the bitcoin and gets the dollars). With cash settlement, the covered Bitcoin may not actually exist, and at expiration if the option is in the money the seller will pay the buyer the difference between the strike and the price. Physically delivered avoids a lot of complexity and risk. Cash settled is essentially a side bet on the price of Bitcoin. With cash settlement you need a "the price", which means you need an index. As a seller of a cash settled option you can potentially get screwed if the index prices aren't reliable-- e.g. someone could buy an OTM option right before expiration, then at moderate cost manipulate the index and force you to pay them a bunch. As a buyer of cash settled options the assets to make good on them may simply not exist in the event of a black swan that turns your position extremely valuable-- potentially resulting in a cascading failure of the exchange. To protect against that risk any exchange engaging in cash settlement will need to have extensive exposure management-- this will automatically force traders to post additional balance if their positions get out of wack. They'll also need to auto-liquidate positions-- potentially profitable ones too. Kind of ironic that when your predictions are right and are moving in your favor you might be liquidated to protect the platform exposure. Platform risk management to users is inherently fairly opaque, traders should be accounting for it in their prices but it's not clear how they can do so rationally without a great deal more information. Any kind of auto-liquidation also disrupts the potential value proposition of options, since part of that value is that you can make a trade once then ride out volatility along the way to the expiration date. So why would anyone ever want to touch cash settled? There are a couple reasons: One is that the settlement process of a physically delivered asset can be inefficient. Say you are super bullish bitcoin-- you bought a bunch of calls, and they're about to expire ITM. Great, but now you need to get a bunch of USD to fund their execution, but you don't have any because you're super bullish on Bitcoin! You can, instead, trade out of the position but the market may not be liquid enough to do this at a good price. In mature markets this is mostly a solved problem: For a modest fee retail brokers will loan you the cash you need for whatever milliseconds it takes to receive the shares and sell them on the spot market. But this is not solved for the Bitcoin options market yet. Another is that regulatory complications make it harder for exchanges to handle USD at all. In a cash-settled options market you can use BTC as your cash, so you can make a platform that is 100% all Bitcoin, no USD (It can even be 100% all bitcoin even when it has options on altcoin/btc). This is also a convenience for customers that don't want USD exposure. Another reason is that since cash settled platforms are inherently having people trade on margin there is no fundamental problem with customers keeping custody of the coins covering their positions in their own wallets. But the flip side of this is that the platform can't guarantee delivery. Cryptocurrency markets and options based on them are already volatile enough that I'm dubious of the belief that market efficiency requires a lot of leverage on these positions. Unfortunately, by their very nature these side bet markets easily generate a lot more volume than physically delivered markets, so to some extent they also may be denying air to the more robust alternatives. Personally, I think cash settled is fraught with long tail systemic risk -- I suppose it has a place in mature and highly liquid markets, but cryptocurrency markets aren't that. I think the risks while clearly large are also not particularly simple or easy to understand-- in theory there is some price where I should be willing to trade at a cash settled market, but I don't believe I could calculate that price. December 08, 2020, 09:12:40 PM
...I don't use deribit because it's not physically delivered,... People disregard this as if it means nothing when in fact it means everything! December 08, 2020, 08:28:04 PM
These particular post really boost the level of my IQ, everything discussing here just look's like film, I don't really know that someone can spend time in preparing such ambiguous and interesting topic that attract attention, how I wish I can be like op via research and construction of topic i won't complain again, infant in recapitulation I so much love these topic because i noticed that is very educating even when you lost attention towards it.
December 08, 2020, 05:39:42 PM
I think your post might make a better case against using deribit. I use LedgerX -- I don't use deribit because it's not physically delivered, doesn't allow US customers, etc.
Quote If he gets exercised on the upside, he's actually losing money in the single trade, but he's probably also making huge money on the whole of his position. This highlights why its not very useful to consider a position without its hedges or what its hedging. E.g. the isolated analysis has you characterize the loss as unlimited-- but for covered positions (which are the only kind of short you can get into on LedgerX) the worst case loss is the value of the collateral minus the premiums you received, which is a very different story. If you were going to hold the collateral for the duration regardless then no loss is possible. The positions I take are a bit wider than you assume-- $7.5k, 5k, or 2k strikes on the put side (which I try to get a premium comparable to a 15-20%/yr on the collateral, depending on the strike/date), and I'm getting more on the call side than you expected: E.g. recent trades have me receiving $2,699/BTC for JUN2021 50k, $6,985/BTC for DEC2021 35k, and $4920/BTC for DEC2021 50K, to give some examples. So lets look at the value at expiration of a position consisting of {2 BTC, -1BTC 35k DEC2021 call, -1BTC 5k DEC2021 put} using some recent trade prices, and compare that to just hodl the same 2 BTC: In exchange for diminished returns over a BTC price of $42,866, the position gets increased value at all lower prices. Another way to look at is is in terms of ratios of dollar values: So under a hypothetical crash to $2,866 the position is twice as valuable in dollar terms compared to hodl. If Bitcoin crashed to nothing the position would be worth $2867. Back when I acquired most of my Bitcoin $1,433/BTC would have been considered a fantasy moon price, its a price below the ATH up until May 2017. At the ATH price of (say) $21,000/BTC, the position is 18% better off than hodl and even at $36,953/BTC the position is a respectable 8% ahead of hodl. True, at a super-moon price of $500k/BTC the position is only worth 54% of HODL, but it's still worth 14.28 times its current value at that price. Of course, in the crash situation I'd be better off selling now but we don't know the future. I think crashes and supermoons are certainly possible, but I also don't consider either to be extremely likely in the next year. It's also worth considering in BTC terms: These trades help avoid regret: If the BTC price crashes the seller (me) at least locked in some income (or, alternatively, gets a lot more BTC), while if the price stays flat-ish this position gets a ~20%/yr return and the seller doesn't need to regret not selling BTC and investing the funds elsewhere. In the moon case the trade limits the returns but there are only so many lambos a person can need (in my case I need exactly zero lambos, but you get the point). I'm pretty bullish on the future Bitcoin price, but I'm also not in dire need of astronomical amounts of wealth. I find it generally more valuable to me to mitigate risk. Even under the most aggressive model of mid term future prices that I find vaguely justifiable-- assuming the future price is a random walk with the same distribution as the returns since 2013 that 35k call is <50% likely to get assigned. Under a more conservative model -- using the derivative of delta at the options premium to get the assignment odds under black-scholes
There are a lot of people who seek to profit off volatility in other ways, e.g. day trading the bitcoin spot market. But the fees and taxes from doing that can be considerable and the risk is substantial. Of course there is also custodial risk, though this position only needs to expose half its Bitcoin to third party custody. I've also ignored the tax implications. But I think whatever your tolerance for risk and/or ideas about the future values of Bitcoin say, there is usually a way to use options to get an outcome that better meets your needs.
Quote so he knows he's betting against the "black swans". The way I see it, owning Bitcoin on an ongoing basis is a massive bet for and against a collection of black swans: Owning Bitcoin is a bet for BTC becoming a world currency, fiat hyperinflation, widespread distrust in institutions/monetary policy, and massive globalization of economies (with concordant lack of functional legal process across borders, making irreversible and machine arbitrated transactions more valuable). Owning Bitcoin is also a bet against technical/economic fault destroying Bitcoin's viability, effective adverse regulation denying people access to Bitcoin, Bitcoin businesses being so corrupt or incompetent that they scare everyone away, the collapse of technological society, or Bitcoin not being the solution to the prior list of pro-bitcoin black swans that people adopt. I believe that the current price substantially reflects a balance between these considerations. In general I share the view that these black swans-- both the positive and negative ones-- are credible but at the same time I also believe many people over-estimate their likelihood especially in the short to mid term. So by owning Bitcoin (as well as non-cryptocurrency assets) and selling the BTC/USD return tails I seek to turn the the difference between my beliefs and more extreme beliefs into profit, along with locking in some of those black swan gains now when they can do me some good rather than in some hypothetical future that I might not even live to see. Simultaneously, I believe the marginal value of additional wealth isn't constant-- and so I think there is the potential for mutually beneficial trade even with someone who shares a similar perspective on the distribution of future prices but just has a different risk preference than I do. Aside, I did some image processing magic and managed to make a 'flatter' projection of my bookshelves. December 08, 2020, 09:45:42 AM
I wish I could understand this better but I am a total fool within this field and I would not even know where to start! I will try to re-read gmaxwell's interview and re-read again your post because I feel so stupid that I can't get anywhere around it. Thank you very much for this detailed post, you must have dedicated quite some time to it. It is not about being stupid or intelligent. It’s about studying certain topics. I dedicated many years of my life to these topics, and now I think I can manage those instruments quite well. It took many years, so don’t think you are stupid because you don’t understand this at the first read. Actually, a stupid person would think they have learned “all they wanted to know about option” from this thread! December 08, 2020, 09:34:43 AM
I wish I could understand this better but I am a total fool within this field and I would not even know where to start! I will try to re-read gmaxwell's interview and re-read again your post because I feel so stupid that I can't get anywhere around it. Thank you very much for this detailed post, you must have dedicated quite some time to it.
December 08, 2020, 05:33:19 AM
In the past days, Greg Maxwell has been interviewed on the forum. You can read the full interview here , it is really an interesting interview, perhaps the most interesting read so far, I strongly recommend reading the whole of it. As far as this thread is concerned, there is a special passage that is relevant: I trade options on Bitcoin at LedgerX with a portion of my stash. Most of my trading could be characterised as selling moon insurance (deep out of the money calls) and crash insurance (deep out of the money puts). For the most part, the activity hedges my substantial Bitcoin exposure-- and it more than covers all of my living expenses which gives me peace of mind. I've averaged a ~20%/yr return on investment (not including Bitcoin's gain in value, of course) since I opened the account in December 2017. I think more people trading Bitcoin should be interested in options: They can be used to better reflect the kinds of opinions people have about Bitcoin's price and can be shaped to better match people's risk tolerance. For people who want more risk options (esp physically delivered ones like LedgerX) can be a lot safer than the leveraged Bitcoin products traded elsewhere. They can also be more tax efficient. In the following post I will try to analyse Greg's strategy from a technical point of view. For the moment I will abstain from the "tax efficient part" as it has a lot to do about very specific details of Greg's position I don' know and I can't guess about. Maxwell's strategy is called "short strangle": that is the sale ("go short" means to sell something) of a "strangle" that is an option strategy composed of a put option and a a call option with the same maturity on the same underlying. Example: Code: Short a 20% delta Six months Strangle I tried to create this strategy using Deribit Options, as he referenced them on the thread. He never mentioned 20% delta or six months time horizon, these are just working hypothesis. So, trying to find out the options as close as possibile to the desired delta level I found those two: Sell 1 44,000 CALL Strike K=44,000 expiry 25 Jun 2021 for 0.0594 BTC Sell 1 14,000 PUT Strike K=14,000 expiry 25 Jun 2021 for 0.0681 BTC This means cashing in 0.1276 between 14,000 and 44,000 being exposed to unlimited losses on the extreme movements. Bear in mind that currently the BTC Jun futures trades at 20,290 The position details are the following:
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