Strategies for the crashing market
This year is a wonderful time to short the market. During the pandemic the Fed has been pumping money into the market, and it was clear that the huge rally from March 2020 to December 2021 was nothing but a bubble. It was also obvious that the rally would be reversed by the turn from Quantitative Easing to Quantitative Tightening. Since just about all assets are falling, shorting the market is a very low risk play. The question of timing the trades will not be discussed here (January, March, May and August have been the best entry points). We look into how options can be used for shorting.
Put debit spread
When the market crashes, shorting indices (S&P 500, NASDAQ, Dow 30 and Russell 2000) or their proxies (exchange traded funds SPY, QQQ, DIA and IWM) is less risky than shorting individual stocks. That's what I learned (among many other things) from John Carter. Using put options instead of shorting stocks requires less capital. A further reduction in the capital requirement is achieved by using put debit spreads (their effect on buying power is zero).
Denote the price of a put with a strike
We know that
increases with
(you have to pay more for the right to sell at a higher price). A put debit spread strategy has been discussed earlier. It consists of two put options (sorry for the notation change): buy a put
with a higher strike
and sell a put
with a lower strike
The initial outlay is
Let
be the stock price at expiration
The max profit is
and it is positive if
The max loss is
The payoff is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Put debit spread on the left, call credit spread on the right
Call credit spread
A call credit spread is a strategy consisting of two call options: buy a call with a higher strike
and sell a call
with a lower strike
Since you have to pay more for the right to buy at a lower price, we have
and you are credited
For the payoff we have 3 cases.
1) Case Both calls are out of the money and the max profit is
2) Case The
call, being in the money, is exercised by the buyer and you lose
The
is out of the money and expires worthless. Thus the payoff is
and the break-even stock price is
3) Case . Both calls, being in the money, are exercised. The profit from the long call
is
and the loss from the short call
is
, so the payoff is their sum plus the credit
Normally, it is a loss.
Comparison of the two strategies
The above discussion is summarized in Figure 1. Both strategies can be used if the outlook is bearish. Here we indicate two situations when one is preferred over the other.
Situation 1. Following unexpected bad news, the market falls a lot in one day and it is clear from macroeconomics that it will continue to go down for some time. If prior to the fall there was a healthy rally, it didn't make sense to buy a put. Right after the fall volatility increases, so puts become expensive. Buying a put debit spread is appropriate because volatilities from the long and short legs of the spread offset each other and one can increase the potential gain by selecting the strikes further apart.
Situation 2. A different approach is appropriate if a strong one-day fall is expected and any further developments are hard to predict. In this case selling a call credit spread with close expiration is recommended. This allows the investor to take advantage of the time decay. The strikes are selected above the current price
The time value decay for the short call
will be greater than for the long call
(because the latter has a higher probability of staying out of the money). Therefore the open profit will quickly approach the max profit
and the spread can be closed out earlier. This allows the investor to capture most of the premium received from placing the trade.
Mathematical approach to evaluating strategies
This will be explained using call credit spreads
Step 1. The payoff from a long call, neglecting the price paid, is
(if
you throw away the call and get
if
you exercise the right to buy the stock and get
).
Step 2. What the long party gains, the short party looses, so the payoff from the short position (this time neglecting the credit received) is
Step 3. Let The payoff from the call credit spread is the sum of the payoffs from the first two steps:
Evaluating this expression for different price intervals gives the next table:
if |
|
if |
|
if |
Step 4. Adding the premium received we get the total payoff
if |
|
if |
|
if |
Exercise. For a long put the payoff is for a short one
for the strategy with
it is
where debit is as above.
The pictures have been produced in Mathematica with
I put them side by side for you to better see the difference. The risk-reward ratio is better for the put debit spread (the left chart) than for the call credit spread (the right chart). The latter should be closed earlier and it takes longer for the open profit/loss of the former to approach the max profit. Such strategies could have been used a couple of times on SPY since September 12, 2022.
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