Archives of “February 2019” month

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The Heston Recipe

  
  Education
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Most traders are intimately familiar the implied volatilities of equity options. These implied volatilities are often smoothed to avoid the temporary spikes in the strike/maturity surface that can lead to butterfly and calendar arbitrage. Many trading desks and market makers use the Heston stochastic volatility model for smoothing.

To understand the genesis behind Heston model, and why it is so important, we must revisit an event that shook financial markets around the world: the stock market crash of October 1987. The consequence on the options market was an exacerbation of smiles and skews in the implied volatility surface which has persisted to this day. This brought into question the restrictive assumptions behind the Black-Scholes option pricing model, the most tenuous of which is that continuously compounded stock returns be normally distributed with constant volatility. A number of researchers since then have sought to eliminate the constant volatility assumption in their models, by allowing volatility to be time-varying. (more…)

Larry Hite quote about Chance

  
  Education
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“Life is nothing more than a series of bets and bets are really nothing more than questions and their answers. There is no real difference between, ’should I take another hit on this Blackjack hand?’ and ‘Should I get out of the way of that speeding and wildly careening bus?’ Each shares two universal truths: a set of probabilities of potential outcomes and the singular outcome that takes place. Everyday we place hundreds if not thousands of bets – large and small, some seemingly well considered and others made without a second thought. The vast majority of the latter, life’s little gambles made without any thought, might certainly be trivial. ‘Should I tie my shoes?’ Seems to offer no big risk, nor any big reward. While others, such as the aforementioned ’speeding and wildly careening bus’ would seem to have greater impact on our lives. However, if deciding not to tie your shoes that morning causes you to trip and fall down in the middle of the road when you finally decide to fold your hand and give that careening bus plenty of leeway, well then, in hindsight the trivial has suddenly become paramount.”
Larry Hite, Trader

CHANGE IS ESSENTIAL

  
  Education
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The stock market, just like life, can change on a dime.  In the market, just as in life, we must learn to adapt to change.  What separates the great trader from the rest of the crowd is his or her ability to change based on current market conditions.  In other words, NO EGO ALLOWED.  Mark Douglas, in his first book entitled The Disciplined Trader writes,

“There must be a difference between these two types of traders-the small majority of winners and the vast majority of losers who want to know what the winners know. The difference is that the traders who can make money consistently on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis approach trading from the perspective of a mental discipline.  When asked for their secrets of success, they categorically state that they didn’t achieve any measure of consistency in accumulating wealth from trading until they learned self-discipline, emotional control, and the ability to change their minds to flow with the markets.”

We trade the current market conditions as they unfold with a plan to trade one way or the other.  To do otherwise would be to fight an undefeated foe.

Ideas that spread

  
  Education
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Not all great investing/trading ideas are profitable. Ideas that spread are. If no one else sees what you see and acts, you can’t make money. Hoping that eventually the rest of the market will understand and embrace your thesis is a loser’s strategy or a privilege for someone with very deep pockets. Markets often know more than you as they constantly try to discount all the available public and private information. You might be convinced that your analysis is right and the market is wrong, but it could remain wrong longer than you could remain solvent. The question again is do you have deep enough pockets to ride the storm out and aren’t there more plausible alternatives for your capital at the time. Smart people like to scale in and out of positions, knowing that no one can consistently pick tops and bottoms.

Take for example Jim Rogers. He is a typical contrarian investor, who likes to buy low and sell high. But he is not buying anything that is low priced and neglected. He buys cheap things only when he sees a fundamental change on the horizon – a catalyst that will help other market participants to re-evaluate their thesis and act on their new observations.

Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable

  
  Education
In the trading world, you will either make money or lose money on any given trade. All that matters in the end is making more money when you’re right than you lose when you’re wrong.  Knowing this, traders have learned to accept failure as part of the game, but they also use the information they acquire from their mistakes as a learning tool.  Frequently, what they learn from losing money is more valuable than what they learn when they make money
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