Equity and index options expire on the third Friday of each month. As that
moment approaches, unusual market forces create option price distortions, rarely
understood by most investors. These distortions give rise to outstanding trading
opportunities with enormous profit potential. In Trading Options at Expiration, leading
options trader Jeff Augen explores this extraordinary opportunity with never-before
published statistical models, minute-by-minute pricing analysis, and optimized trading
strategies that regularly deliver returns of 40%-300% per trade.
You’ll learn how to structure positions that profit from end-of-contract price
distortions with remarkably low risk. These strategies don’t rely on your ability to
pick stocks or predict market direction and they only require one or two days of market
exposure per month.
If you’re looking for an innovative new way to reignite your returns no matter where
the markets move, you’ve found it in Trading Options at Expiration.
- Why traditional option pricing calculations always break down in the final days
before expiration
Three powerful end-of-cycle effects not comprehended by contemporary pricing models
- Reducing your risk by reducing your market exposure
Trading only one or two days each month and avoiding overnight exposure
- Structuring trades that reflect true expiration-day behavior
Leveraging the surprising power of expiration-day pricing dynamics
Jeff Augen, currently a private investor and writer, has spent over a
decade building a unique intellectual property portfolio of databases, algorithms, and
associated software for technical analysis of derivatives prices. His work, which includes
more than a million lines of computer code, is particularly focused on the identification
of subtle anomalies and price distortions.
Augen has a 25-year history in information technology. As a cofounding executive of
IBM’s Life Sciences Computing business, he defined a growth strategy that resulted in
$1.2 billion of new revenue and managed a large portfolio of venture capital investments.
From 2002 to 2005, Augen was President and CEO of TurboWorx Inc., a technical computing
software company founded by the chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Yale
University. He is the author of three previous books: The Option Trader’s Workbook (FT
Press 2008), The Volatility Edge in Options Trading (FT Press 2008) and Bioinformatics in
the Post-Genomic Era (Addison-Wesley 2005).
Much of his current work on option pricing is built around algorithms for predicting
molecular structures that he developed many years ago as a graduate student in
biochemistry.
Table of Contents
Introduction and Explanatory Notes 1
Chapter 1: Expiration Pricing Dynamics 13
Chapter 2: Working with Statistical Models 55
Chapter 3: Day Trading Strategies 105
Appendix 1: Excel VBA Program for Counting Strike Price Crosses 143
Index 149
176 pages, Hardcover