11 Comments
User's avatar
quantawolfy's avatar

Hi Lay, how you handle the case where the buyer of options wants to exercice its option? due to SPY options are european style.

Expand full comment
Lay Quant's avatar

Hi quantawolfy,

So, if you've sold a 0DTE option spread and get exercised during the trading day, it shouldn't be too much of an issue? At its riskiest, the short options are still protected by a Long Call or Put (Call Spread, Put Spread, Iron Condor) and should prevent a massive swing in value before the end of day.

Under this worst-case scenario you'd get exercised and hold a long/short stock position, but your margin and profits wouldn't move much since you've got an offset from your Long option. SPY options are "American" style, but I've personally yet to be exercised on SPY or really any other ETF for an option during the trading day. The SPY/VIX/VVIX trading system also has you sell your positions an hour before market close, which I feel would decrease the risk of assignment even further.

If you're instead talking about exercising a Long Call you yourself bought, I don't think you'd want to do it? The time value of a long call, even 0DTE should dictate that the 0DTE price + strike will be greater than the stock price. So it'd be better to sell the option than exercise.

If the account I'm using grows large enough I'd like to switch to cash-settled SPX options to remove the issue you've brought up, but that's possibly a while from now.

Expand full comment
quantawolfy's avatar

Hi Lay,

I made an error into my comment, I wanted to say "americain style" instead of "european style". Thx a lot for your return.

Expand full comment
Benjamin Jones's avatar

Thanks for the interesting thoughts. Following you over here from QG.

Looking forward to seeing your results and I may try this out myself as well. Do you plan on updating results as you go?

Expand full comment
Benjamin Jones's avatar

Also, curious what level you are paying for on FMP and whether we can't get this data on polygon? Not sure I want to pay to sign up for another service just to run the backtest. Thanks~

Expand full comment
Lay Quant's avatar

Thanks for the follow, Benjamin! I plan on giving a detailed update of the results after 1 month of trading, so expect a post around September 1st. If it's well-received, I'll keep the experiment going in my account and provide further updates.

For the price data, I'm currently paying for the $69/month FMP plan, because a little while ago I wanted access to a lot of fundamental data. Since we're only pulling historical price data from 2022 to 2024, I think you can actually get it from a Free FMP plan tier, although it might take a few days due to the 250 calls-per-day limit. There's a cheaper $29/month FMP plan that should give you access to the VVIX, SPY, and VIX 1-minute data as well.

Expand full comment
Benjamin Jones's avatar

Sounds good, thanks.

I'm a bit too lazy to spend a week or two building the dataset so I'll probably just put a few ideas together then splurge on some data to build some sets for testing and decide where to go from them. Looking forward to updates / more ideas.

Expand full comment
J1063's avatar

Hi looks great, Ill run the back-test for sure. In production, wouldn't this run into PDT rules/wouldn't be able to run with a 2k account like in back test?

Expand full comment
Lay Quant's avatar

It might run into PDT rules over time. But the strategy is generally only invested 35%-40% of trading days, which should be okay? In case of a cluster of 4+ trades in a row, you could maybe split the $2K account between 2 different brokers so you can switch between them after 3 trades in each.

Expand full comment
quantawolfy's avatar

Hi, looks great, impatient to see the next. May there is an error when you wrote :

"Credit Put Spread: SPY Regime -, VIX -, VVIX -", you mean Credit Call Spread ?

Expand full comment
Benjamin Jones's avatar

Was about to ask the same thing.

Expand full comment