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Insights from Put Underwriting Strategies

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Systematic options trading can be used by equity investment organizations either as additional sources of alpha and yield enhancement or as efficient protection strategies.  

Put options can be used in two large classes of strategies: stock replacement (put underwriting and cash-secured put write) and tail risk hedge (protective puts).  Both are a function of a bullish/bearish bias and the level of implied volatility, either high or low.  

Given the current rich option premiums and a macro environment biased toward near midterm growth, put underwriting and/or cash-secured writing would bring a couple of benefits to equity managers: 

  • Capturing expensive volatility 
  • Paying managers for waiting for better stock entry points when rebalancing Portfolios 

SpiderRock option datasets containing close marks and intraday print sets​ offer interesting possibilities for equity portfolio managers to identify and back-test these put writing strategies as risk-reward enhancers for their equity only portfolios. 

Please contact us for more information at our email gwtsales@spiderrock.net or through our contact page!