Dear All Traders,

This week's free fall of all the indexes and ETF have given options writers the biggest challenge and headaches in many years.

From the data we gathered so far, delta loss and volatility spike have made most accounts to lose 3-12% in two weeks from their recent highs in end August 2008.

Most have recovered the delta loss successfully with good time decay despite the extreme sharp correction in April 2008 and July 2008. If the market still free falling today, the loss will probably extend to 10-20%.

Most ETF, stocks, and indexes have touched the April's low, some have touched 2 years' low. Based on guts feeling and technical standpoint, the market should rebound today. Those short sellers should have covered their short positions tonight.

If the reversal does not happen, keep rolling down the short call to Jan 09 or March 09 to provide ample protection. The current delta loss and loss caused high volatility will be repaired in 1-2 months, once the market stops falling or goes sideways.

As long as you do not let the underlying to gap out from the short call, there is no need to panic. When it comes to options writing and time value collection, anything can be repaired, so long as the underlying does not drop to zero. that is the reason why we encourage short guts traders to write options on ETF or Holders, not single stocks.

Yes, Hanz, we really have to tap the energy from Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin to reverse the trend.

Thanks a lot.

Etradehome.com

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Yes, I noticed oil related ETF/Holders were having a small reversal just now, but not too strong. QQQQ reversed well.

My account dropped 12% from 31 August high, no thanks to XLE, OIH. Let me see how fast the recovery will take to recoup the 12% loss. I added 2 more short guts today because the volatility inflates the time value so much that I could benefit from it once the volatility dies down.

Keep my fingers crossed.

Hanz

Here are the data we gathered. Traders with different underlyings have different loss horizon:

1. Those with only SPY: 3% delta loss. Most yet to roll down because they have rolled to 115, 118 and 120 call during July dip. 3% is just because of delta loss

2. Those with SPY, QQQQ, EEM: 5-8% delta loss.

3. Those with SPY, QQQQ, XLE, OIH, USO: 7-11% delta loss

4. Those with ETF and single stocks: 9-16% delta loss.

Please contribute to the data if you have different ETF/underlying.

Thanks a lot.

Etradehome

Hi everyone,

Sorry for hibernating for a while.

In fact I was trading all the time, just did not update lately.

Thanks for publishing the statistics on delta loss on short guts based on different underlying. My acct was having some financial stocks, some oil ETF and QQQQ. The delta loss (and loss to high volatility) was near 16% yesterday morning (from August's high). After yesterday's slight recovery and rise in oil ETF, my acct is back to -7%.

I think once the market stays flat or up a little in next two weeks, all these delta and volatility loss would be repaired. My acct is still up by 16% year to date, it was be a better returns of 26% year to date before this pre-Sept 11 plunge.

Hope oil will keep on rising during this weekend (sorry, that means I hope a small hurricane will blow away a few oil rigs....)

JK