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3 months agoPortfolio Diversifiers
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recent posts
Early Exercise of Options
Martin Noël
Holding shares in a company gives the shareholder the following rights:*The right to transfer ownership, *The right to dividends, *Voting rights, and *The right to residual income and assets. What this means is that shareholders are free to sell their shares, take dividends when they are paid, vote at shareholder meetings and...
Call Put Parity: How to Transform Your Positions
Martin Noël
I have been told frequently – and surely so have you – that selling cash-secured puts is a very risky strategy. Haven’t you? The main reason put forward for not using this strategy is that you could be forced to buy the security, even if the company had just gone bankrupt. In this light, the strategy rightly raises fears....
Bottom Fishing Cenovus? Hedging may be Appropriate
Patrick Ceresna
Cenovus stirred up the Canadian oil industry back on March 29th with an announcement on the $17.7 billion-dollar purchase of ConocoPhillips’ Canadian oil sand assets. To say the deal was not well received is an understatement as the stock dropped over 10% on the announcement and continued to actively distribute lower. From...
Delta: Assessing Probabilities Based on the Break-even price
Martin Noël
As we saw in an earlier article, delta measures how much an option’s price moves in relation to a change in the price of the underlying asset. Delta is a variable from the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and it is also used in the industry as an approximation of the probability that the option will be in-the-money at...
It’s Good to be the Insurer
Hans Albrecht
Option pricing, or insurance, is a relative value product. For instance, a $300 annual premium for $1 million of life insurance coverage for a young, healthy individual is reasonable. However, that same $300 price tag to insure a 65 year-old smoker with high blood pressure is way too cheap. When it comes to life...
Purchasing Put Options or Selling Call Options to Protect Oneself? (Third and Last Part)
Martin Noël
In the two previous articles, we compared purchasing put options as a protective strategy with selling covered call options. The first article used options with monthly expirations, and the second article used options expiring after our period of analysis, from April 17, 2015 to January 22, 2016. In both cases, the analysis led...
Purchasing put options or selling call options to protect oneself? (Part 2)
Martin Noël
In the last article, we compared purchasing put options with selling call options. We reached the conclusion that, in the absence of a known target price and timeframe, it is better to use strategies that take advantage of the decaying time value of options, such as selling call options, as protection against a decline in the...
Purchasing put options or selling call options to protect oneself?
Martin Noël
Is it better to purchase put options or to sell call options for protection against loss? Many investors ask this question but, in this as in many areas, there is no single right answer. As we have seen in earlier articles, purchasing options has one major disadvantage: the erosion of the time value that must be counterbalanced...
