Hi
Some question I was asked and I like to present them here:
What I grasped was, the value of option depends on three factors:
1. price of underlying
2. time remaining for expiry. the more the time remaining, its better for the buyer, hoping for price of underlying to move in his direction.
3. implied volatitily and open interest : the higher the OI , its better for the buyer.
4 Should we consider buying an option , whose OI is high ?
5 how do we find the implied volatility ? is it same as OI?
6 should we consider alpha, beta and gamma also while buying option?
7 i guess writing options is more profitable and easier to trade then buying options,but it seems riskier.
8 is it safer then buying/selling futures?
please try to answer my queires/doubts when you are free.
hope am not disturbing you.
My answers:
1. Yes
2. Depends:
otm with low implide vola = Low time decay and otm with high implide vola high time decay
atm with low implied vola = High time decay
itm with low implied vola = Low time decay
That said, you even can be right in direction and as vola maybe starts to decrase, you not will make any money.
3. There is no connection between Implied volatility and open interest.
4 Yes. Open Interest gives me an idea about if there are buyers and sellers on a specific strike level. If there is no open interest on a specific strike level I will have problems to trade options on that strike as there are no buyers and sellers.
5. OI and IMV are two very different things. OI see point 4.
Implied volatility can give us a signal, that the market particpants expect some thing to happen in the near future in the market. If they pay suddenly higher prices for certain strike levels, even market did not move, depending if it was on the call or put side, they expect market to move up ( call side ) or expect market to fall ( put side ).
Example: Big economic numbers are coming the next day. Some will buy calls because they expect market to move up and so they are willing to pay higher prices for the same strike at the moment and vice versa for the put side. If the price of a call on a certain strike levels gets more expensive with out any market move, the implied volatility in this call starts to change. In this case up.
6 No
7 No. It all depends on knowledge and experience. There is no easier.
8 Yes and No. Depends again on knowledge and experience.
DanPickUp