By Brad Levi
I am sure we would all like to make a lot of money with the best option trading ideas. In fact, there are concepts and methods that can be implemented using a small options trading account, for example, using a $,2000 account, and risking $300 – $500 on single, selective, and fair probability trades. These are the trades that would have a smaller probability of going well, than the rest we usually do, but they can often have a huge profit potential. And I mean huge beyond anything you can imagine!
We are going to discuss 2 such high profit potential concepts, and one small profit potential concept. They are all considered low budget option trading ideas, and can be implemented using ATM or OTM options.
1.Capturing company mergers and acquisitions phases
2.Capturing technical momentum breakouts
3.Ways to trade OTM options in high probability setups
Lets see them in detail, concept 1 is well known, but is it really possible to know where the next merger will occur? The fact is that most of the mergers happen during market tops and bottoms, they dont happen as often in a any other period. In fact the vast majority of companies, do that! During market tops and bottoms, so you only have to watch out just before that major market top or bottom. That is the top of a bull market and the bottom of a bear market, but there are also, other rare cases in between, where a merger may be detected.
It takes a lot of research, fundamental research and market savvy to figure out what weak balance sheet companies could merge with what strong companies. And how they see mutual benefits. If you cant do it yourself, you can still find experts who perform this fundamental analysis, follow the news closely, and could provide you with the list of the favourable candidates.
Beyond that, you should also understand yourself how this works, for example: what if company A merges with Company B? And if A is much bigger and stronger than B, then Bs stock price will skyrocket! And not only you can buy Bs stock at a low price, but if the merger is set to take place during a bear market bottom, then both the stocks of A and B will be significantly lower than their actual intrinsic value, or just way lower than their 5 year highs!
Actual profit potential on company mergers is enormous, sometimes you can turn $500 into $30,000 by just buying a cheap ATM or OTM Call option! It may sound like a long shot bet, but it doesnt have to be like that! You can increase the probability of winning by doing your own research at the right time, and on the most likely candidate stocks. That way you know, that you are really getting the odds on your side, even if you place a series of 10 trades, at $500 each, and 8 trades lose say 50% of their value because of the merger plans being cancelled, you can still make a fortune on the remaining two!
If we assume you lose a total of $2,000 on the trades gone bad, and this is a worst case scenario! You still get 2 mergers right, and you get in early in the options trade, what if these two trades make a 20fold gain on your $500 option trade? You get back $20,000 from these 2 accurate trades!
This technique is possible and requires a lot of market savvy in analyzing and monitoring company news and their business outlook.
Then we have technique number 2, capturing technical momentum that is about to be released. Well believe it or not, most of the time, high volume, quality stocks whose companies are about to merge, DO produce technical indications on the charts. These indications are foretelling of a huge breakout to occur, even though we cannot be so sure about the direction, with a little bit of more digging into the news and fundamentals we can gain more insight as to what the most likely scenario is.
Please be aware that option brokers are the market makers here, they will use all information available to price their option premiums. The good news is that they can only use what is out there, and as we have seen, the options pricing formula uses stock parameters that are merely a story about the past. In no way does implied volatility accurately predict stock price fluctuation, it does provide accuracy on average, and over 1000s of stocks so that option brokers adjust the premiums at a fair price. Call options sellers (From whom you will buy your Call option) will be paid a fair premium.
But this doesnt mean they cannot be completely wrong on a single stock, of course they can be wrong!
This is like car insurance companies, their insurance premiums are calculated to protect the company against the average expected loss, and sure the company will never lose money in the long term. But they cannot predict and pinpoint the driver that will make the next massive claim, neither are they clever enough to identify the number of fraudulent claims some savvy car drivers successfully make!
Statistics works collectively, but is not a crystal ball! And the option pricing formula often gets caught, completely off guard when a technical breakout occurs, that is because this formula doesnt take technical analysis into account!
In fact some people and some academics dont believe in technical analysis at all.
For the rest of us who do believe in technical analysis, we have seen it very often, proving market makers and their option premiums wrong!
Check out this simple triangle formation on the Microsoft stock (MSFT), this pattern is a very reliable breakout pattern, and the options pricing formula does not see it:
In such cases, or even other even more dramatic cases, you can buy cheap ATM options, and make a very good profit. The option market makers will offer you a cheap ATM option, or even a really cheap OTM option. In the above case of Microsoft, an OTM option could be really cheap, and have a Delta of around 10. A Delta of 10 means that the option will only make $0.10 for every $1 the stock moves higher, up until it becomes ITM. A Delta of 10 also tells you that they believe this option has a 10% probability of expiring in-the-money, and it may sound discouraging, almost like a lottery ticket. But the technical analysis picture above tells me that the stock will prevail over the option pricing formula and the low Delta! The only thing I need is enough price movement.
This is just an event of uneven probability, (event A is far more likely than event B) here we know that they have kept premiums low, even though we know volatility will breakout soon, and I also know the stock will most likely go up. I can therefore profit from this move by risking a very small amount of money!
Again, like I mentioned, these opportunities emerge here and there, everyday in the markets. The probability is there, to actually outsmart the market makers by profiting big, from a cheap option. Like I said, from an opportunity perspective, its equivalent to fooling a car insurance company and making a fraudulent claim, one that their experts cannot understand.
Bear in mind that Mergers and Technical breakouts can sometimes coincide, you may get technical confirmation of the suspected merger, even though we treat them separately!
Finally, we have the 3rd concept mentioned in this article, that is trading only OTM options, ideally selling them. This is not something new, but we need to focus on the low-budget option trading principle!
By observing implied and historical volatilities, using Anlayzetrade.com back testing tools, one can sell OTM options when these are the most expensive, and then buy them back when they become cheaper (When implied volatility is low compared to implied volatility range, and historical volatility range)
Selling options is not a low budget strategy, but there are ways and strategies that take care of this by implementing protection, (covered option writing) where the trader finds the opportunity to write options, then also finds a trade to hedge this risk just to minimise the margin requirements of the broker, and make it indeed a low budget selling strategy.
For example we have seen Calendar spreads, where you can profit from the fast time decaying option, while staying protected from moderate adverse moves. This eliminates the need of a large account size. But we can also devise trades where the objective is to profit from the underlying stocks move, while being sellers. Again popular ideas are not very profitable or smart. You still need stock-specific, technical analysis based strategies. But they do work! And Analyzetrade.com offers just the tools required to develop these strategies. The objective here is to write ITM options of high value, that will become OTM and cheap, within few days.
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About the Author: Option Software from Asio Investment Tools gives you the opportunity to practice on historical charts and test against actual market conditionswithout risking a penny of your money!
Intuitive, simple to use, Options Softwareoptionseducation.org/
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