Odd LotsThis Is How Derivatives Trading Swallowed the Entire Market
For a long time, the world of derivatives trading was a niche thing, largely occupied by professional investors who used them for hedging purposes. During the pandemic and the Robinhood boom, the retail masses started discovering them, and activity exploded. Since then, the use of options, swaps and other levered positions has grown among both individual traders and the big professionals on Wall Street. There are countless influencers on social media promising "guaranteed" returns from various options selling strategies. New ETFs have been launched that embed derivatives inside them. And institutions which might historically have employed simple, sleepy investments, are now making them part of their core mix. So how did this happen, and what effect is it having on the market? On this episode, we speak with Benn Eifert, partner at QVR Advisors, about the evolution of this world, why you should not get your trading advice from Instagram, and how this trend has reshaped the entire market.
Read more: World’s Largest Options Market Weathers Indian Regulatory Curbs
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Hey, there are aud Loots listeners. It's Tracy Alloway.
And Joe Wisenthal.
We are very excited to announce that Audlots is going to Washington That's right.
For the first time, we are going to do a live public odd lotch recording in our nation's capital. That's going to be March twelfth in Washington, DC at the Miracle Theater and guests will be announced in the coming days, but in the meantime you can find a ticket link at Bloomberg dot com, slash odd.
Lots, Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Audlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Joe, as part of my preparation for this episode, I have spent the morning on TikTok and Twitter, slash x Instagram watching videos.
Did you find any good techniques that you are going to employ for generating two hundred thousand dollars a year on two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in capital by selling short term options? You know what?
First of all, there are so many accounts that are basically pitching trading with derivatives options. Some variation of those nowadays. I did, to your point, find a guy a video of a guy saying that one thousand dollars is only nine doubles away from becoming a million, and a million. True, a million is only ten doubles away from a billion.
So that's true too. Now, I think that sounds roughly right. Yeah, so what's the catch? You know, someone's got to do it.
No catch, Joe, It's it's all good. We can all be billionaires. No, I think. I think the thing about derivatives trading nowadays is when it's started, it was very much a retail phenomenon. It was, you know, the guys on Wall Street bets Yo, lowing into some crazy derivatives trade, basically buying a lottery ticket on the market. But what's happened since then is derivatives have really gone mainstream in various ways. So, for instance, if you look at options like across the S and P five hundred right now, something like sixty percent of the volume is shorter dated options. So yeah, zero DT or one DT, which is kind of crazy.
It's totally crazy, you know. I remember first, do you remember Tracy early on when we started at Bloomberg, You brought in. There was someone I forget who it was, but there was someone from some sort of like actual like institutional options trading research firm that came in and did this little like mini seminar for some of the reporters on like how to analyze options data. Do you remember doing that you brought in anyway, But one of his points was is that the purpose of options are like they're largely hedging instruments. They're sort of tactically used by institutions for very specific purposes, you know, insurance essentially, that options sort of played this role as insurance for specific things. And then since then I get the impression that the world is just like totally changed. And I think the other thing that surprised me. I would have guessed that if we're sitting here in twenty twenty five, that that craziness of twenty twenty one would have been some sort of peak. Right, there is Robinhood here, Memestock, ere et cetera. I would not have guessed the durability of it, especially with the FED having hiked and everything that we've seen transpires.
Since No, that's my point, right, Instead of like the Yolo crowd basically reducing their options trading. Instead, we had Wall Street yoloing into options trading to serve first. Okay, So options, derivatives, they're everywhere right now, and you have different groups of people, so institutional and retail using them. You have a bunch of different strategies, you have a bunch of different products that deploy them, that give again new types of traders access. So we should talk about it.
Let's do it.
And who do we call to talk about derivatives? The perfect guest, one man, the perfect guest. We have Ben i for managing partner at QVR. Back with us, Ben, thanks for coming back.
On Tracy Joe. It's so good to see you, guys. I'm really excited about this. It's always so much fun talking to you.
It's been a while. I have to say, maybe just to start out with videos' favorite.
The one actually from a few days ago that I just absolutely loved. I'm gonna I'm gonna forget her name off the top of my head, but she's called the she Wolf of Indian options trading and she has a whole show. She was actually reacing me. She was recently banned by the Indian government from you know, doing what she's doing because she's sort of so controversial, but she's very intimidating it. Like I like to kind of take on these option influencers and sort of say, look, you know, come on, guys, this isn't right. I don't know, man, she's she's pound, you know, pounding the table about making one hundred percent in ten minutes, you know, like guaranteed profits, interdate options trading over and over again while like a band plays in the background and fireworks go off. It's like truly incredible stuff.
I'm reading an article on livemint dot com SCBI, which I guess is the Indian regulator banning her from capital markets. But one hundred percent in ten minutes sounds pretty good.
What's the kid, what's the cat? Well, it turns out it's a lot better money for her than it is.
Usually Well what is Okay, that's a very extreme example, but we all, you know, we've all seen these videos. The modal TikTok options is influencer. What is the sort of the gist of what they're telling viewers that they can do.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean the things that you that they say, you guys just kind of joked a little bit about this earlier, but you know, make twenty thousand dollars a month in passive income, you know, easily with only a two hundred and fifty thousand.
What's the gist of that stor we all are very skeptical results, But what is the basic thing that they're saying that you.
Can absolutely achieve. The typical thing these days is they want you to sell short data, short term options, right, And there's various formats that might take. The really popular stuff might be just selling puts, you know, one month puts on your favorite stocks or on the equity index, or maybe weekly puts or maybe zero DT puts, sort of daily puts over and over again. Could be selling covered calls or uncovered calls. Could be selling you know, straddles or strangles or whatever it is. But the common idea or the kind of they'll pack all of these different handwavy justifications into why this is free money or why this is really easy. You'll hear people say, oh, ninety percent of options expire out of the money, so it's just super easy. You just make money on all these trades, you know, and then and then anything that could go wrong they explain away as how it's not really a problem. You know, Oh, well, if you sell the put and the stock goes down, then you get to buy the stock really cheap and the stock is going to go back up and it's kind of fine. Or you know, oh, you reduce your cost basis on the stock over and over again, and then then you get the stock for free. For all of these things over and over again. Where at the end of the day, Look, if you say you can sell an option, that's fine. It's just a trade. It has a payoff profile. You get a little bit of premium and maybe you lose a bunch of money or maybe you don't, and you can kind of analyze that trade the same way you would analyze any trade. It's not free money, you know. But the justifications and explanations and persuasiveness that goes into this from these from these kind of influences is very powerful.
Do we have any sense of what people are using these four And you know, one thing I hear in particular on shorter dated options from this mostly comes from institutional traders, but the idea that well, these allow you to be more precise when you're hedging. This is a tactical move versus a strategic move. But then of course you look at something on a subreddit or something like that and people are just basically buy lottery tickets.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So, you know, derivatives have been around for a long time, and options have been around for a long time, and they certainly enable you to make very customized, precise bets or hedges in intelligent ways if that's what you're trying to do, and you know, that's super. But most of what you see being sold on YouTube or on Instagram is much more. You know, you should just do this all the time. This just makes sense. This is basically free money. It's really easy.
There's no accompanying strategy.
There's no accompanying strategy of when and why might something like this make sense? At what price? How do you know if it's a good trade. There's none of that. It's just justification that somehow this is a cheat code in markets that just lets you unlocked the infinite money, an infinite money cheat code that lets you unlock sort of spectacular returns.
One day, Tracy, We're going to do an episode on the cheat code that I did find in markets, which I have I think i've hinted it.
Wait, you found one and you're still here.
Well, the short version is, I did find a cheat code in nineteen ninety nine. I didn't know that I had found a cheat code at the time, and so I was like, oh, at some point I'll pick this back up. But in retrospect, I should have gotten all my friends and family to go all into it for a month. I could talk about it some other time. I did briefly find it. Cheat coulde in the markets, and I thought, I was like, you know, and.
He didn't tell any of.
Us, Yeah, I didn't. I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. I made ten thousand dollars. You know, we talk about volatility, right, and so just a very crudely you know, they're you know, maybe higher vall opportunities present good times because you're getting large premium or whatever for some of the options trading, et cetera. What are like people who find who like walk into these extremely naive strategies, Oh, option ninety percent of the time options expire out of the money. What does the payoff look like for them? How many days do they how many pennies can they pick up before they get steamrollered?
Yeah, totally. I mean, these kind of strategies again, if you're just doing them all the time without thinking about it, without thinking about the price, and you're just going out like on the S ANDT for example, and selling options, you know, most of the time these days, because that's a crowded one way trade where lots of people sell short dated options. You'll tend to make kind of a little bit of money at a time, sort of choppily for a while, and then once every you know, three years or five years, you'll kind of get wiped out and end up down.
You just start getting into it the day after the wipeout exactly.
And actually that's and actually there is something to that. Usually usually it's like a month or two after the wipeout because you don't know if there's going to be another big leg down or something. But there does tend to be some excess risk premium and options markets a little while after a big market crash that blows out a lot of these guys and kind of causes people to panic, that's totally true. And then that tends to go away after another you know whatever it is year or two years or something like that.
So just in terms of the expansion of all different types of derivatives. I don't want to focus too much on shorter dated options because there are some other things out there that look really interesting. One of them is I saw a headline float by about the University of Connecticut's endowment dropping some of its hedge fund exposure in favor of buffer ETFs. What are buffer ETFs?
Yep, So this is a a big new manifestation of a relatively old popular idea. So buffer ETFs are usually pitched as sort of defined outcomes in some sense over some time period where they say, well, what you're trying, what we're trying to do is give you equity exposure, but you have protection. You have a buffer down to say ten or fifteen percent, where you're not going to lose money as the market goes down, and then beyond that point you're exposed. And in order to do that, you're going to sell an upside call. You're going to give up some of your upside And so what this is it's basically just a put spread caller, which is a very standard kind of option structure. You sell a call to buy a put spread. That is for many many years and decades, by far the most popular thing that a Wall Street derivative salesperson will run around trying to pitch to their clients. It's a very easy thing to conceptualize, I'm giving up some upside, I'm getting some protection. They can be structured so that there's sort of zero premium outlay where you sell a call and use that same amount of money to buy a put. So if you're an aggressive salesman, you call that like a free hedge or a zero cost hedge. Of course you're giving up upside, so you can it can be very cool to pay.
For it, but only implicitly by some notional change that you're not thinking about.
That's exactly right. And there's three legs to the trade, so there's lots of bit offer spread and lots of commissions. So salespeople and traders really like that, and they're very, very very popular now. Buffer ETFs these days enable a retail investor or a high net worth individual to go and get that just by buying an ETF, you know, with a seventy basis points management fee or whatever it is, instead of having to, you know, be involved with Wall Street banks or doing trading themselves. People love that. There are very famous mutual funds like the JP Morgan one that everybody talks about, and it's twenty two billion dollars of assets or something like that. And now there's I think something like ninety billion dollars of bufferytf's doing the same kind of thing. And they're all doing something very very similar, which is again they're selling call it an eight percent or ten percent out of the money call or seven percent of the money call. They're buying an apt the money or slightly downside put and then selling out another like a ten percent down or fifteen percent down put to kind of give yourself this bus on the way down. You're giving up upside on the way up.
One thing I don't get is like, why would you prefer doing that versus just buying a bunch of equities and maybe hedging in a more traditional way like buying some bonds.
So this is exactly the right question. So the first thing that you know, a derivatives person looks at when you look at a trade like this is Okay, what does this do to the delta the equity exposure of your position? Right? So if you buy some equities that is a one delta, A derivatives guys would say, it's just a delta one position. Market goes up a percent, you make a percent. If you trade a typical put spread caller against that, you buy a put spread, you sell a call, you're probably going to take that one.
Sorry. What's a put spread?
Is a posh to put? A put spread would be you buy say the out the money put, but then you sell a ten percent out of the money put. Okay, So that's going to give you protection only for ten percent. Okay. So if you do that kind of a trade, you might take your one delta option down to like a point six down to a sixty delta, So now you're only participating kind of sixty percent in the movements of the market. And if you look at how these kind of trades perform over long periods of time, they actually act a whole lot just like having sort of sixty percent as much stock, right, because ultimately they're rolling these it's not really like a buy and hold to maturity thing. It's like they're rolling these options to kind of maintain this kind of exposure. And if you were just to take the counterfactual, which is why don't I just own sixty percent as much stock? And put forty percent of the rest in T bills. Turns out your fees are way less and your performance is probably better. Right, So you're doing this creative, smart sounding options thing, but actually you're underperformed.
Are there institutions, you know, trace you mentioned the University of Connecticut. You know, institutions have sometimes very specific needs they need to have, like a guarantee return very long term. They may not be optimizing for maximum returns. They have to dole out a certain amount for student aid, whatever it is. Are there certain types of institutions where, whether we're talking about the buffer ETFs specifically or analogus to that strategy, that this is, in your view, in alignment with the institutional mandate.
So that there are cases when that's to some extent true, at least with some kinds of derivative structures. So you will have cases where there's like a big dispersement that has to be made at some future date and they want to lock in for sure the fact that they can make that dispersement. But usually something more like an outright put is going to be a better match for that, right, Because the thing about the put spread or the put spread collor is you've only got like this, say, ten percent buffer of protection, and what if the market crash, So.
If the stock falls, or if the market falls twenty five percent, which does happen, you're actually not protected against all of that.
Yeah, exactly right. So this stuff really doesn't like lock in defined outcomes to the downside. It just gives you of some buffer of protection in exchange for some upside that you're losing.
You touched on this earlier, but talk to us a little bit more about the commissions and the execution and whether or not you're getting a good deal on those, because my sense is these all seem to be algorithmic, right, very mechanical, So I'm not entirely sure what you're paying for.
He yeah, no, So this is a really important point. So generally these are not always, but typically these kind of structures exist in fairly popular, fairly liquid underlyings. Right. This isn't like microcapstocks. This is S and P or something. So the you know, the bid offer spreads don't look that wide when you look at it. But you have to keep in mind if you have a twenty two billion dollar fund that once a quarter is rolling this giant collar and everybody knows about it and knows exactly what you're going to do and knows exactly when you're going to do it, then obviously the market just moves right ahead of you, right and everybody positions first trade.
What happened during Vollmageddon as well, very much so.
When when you have a big tray that everybody knows what you're going to do and when you're going to do it, they're going to position ahead of that. In this specially in a poor liquidity environment, you know that's going to really hurt you. Like markets can you know, the markets can move very significantly as market makers and arbitrazurers and volatility people sort of position for this big trade that's coming. And so the execution you end up getting in these trades is really poor. And usually they're not again they're doing something very simple, very mechanical. They're not randomizing their trades in small batches to work into position really efficiently. They're just outsourcing execution to some agency only broker who doesn't care at all about how they just have to get a filled and they put it up way over the offer side of where the market really should be.
Are there funds that claim to do something more sophisticating, because it does sound obvious, like all the rules are out there, the prospectus, the mechanics, the timing, et cetera. It does seem very I guess front runnable. Do they have tactics or approaches to avoid what sounds like the most obvious risk in the world.
Yeah, I mean certainly there are you know, volatility arbitrage type of funds like ours and like others out there. We will work with institutional clients that are trying to do some similar kinds of things, but in an intelligent way. And yeah, the way we execute in the marketplace is very different, right, So we take the same objective of the exposure we want to get, but we're going to work into it sort of passively and secretly and quietly in very smart ways and try to kind of get mid market execution and have nobody know what we're doing.
And so the competitive advantage is really on the execution side rather than the actual design of the product.
Yeah, there's probably some of both. I mean, one thing one thing you want to do is execute really efficiently without people knowing what you're doing. Another thing you want to do is just know what the big flows and big crowded trades in the market are and generally be trying to achieve the client subjectives, but ideally by buying something that's getting sold too much as opposed to selling something that everybody else is selling. Right, So those two components, that's a kind of a strategy design aspect, and then there's just an execution implementation aspect that's again really important and people just aren't incentivized for it. Like when you think about these the buffer ETFs derivatives using ETFs, it's really kind of a Wild West type of boomtown scenario right now, right, And I would say, you know, generally the first to market has an advantage, and it's all about distribution and very and you know, implementation details are very secondary. Right. The people have been really successful are marketers and distributors hitting the street hard. They're not you know, vall traders who are designing these things.
All the influencers. I'm just going to throw out random derivatives products. So if you could just define them, what is the wheel and why does it have an E t F named after it?
Yes, this is this is fantastic. So it kind of goes back a little bit to the mean stock options crave. You know they're ticker. Is it? Is it w h H E L Wheel?
Isn't it?
I think it's four letter. I think it's w h H E L.
If you no, I think it's it's w E E L.
O w E L. That's peerless option wheel, peerless that they put peerless, Yes, tell us about the wheel.
Yeah. So the a lot of the original mean stock option traders who made a bunch of money in g M and you know AMC back in the day, some of them sort of migrated from that into getting really interested in options selling, and in particular kind of a strategy called the wheel, where the idea is you're going to sell against short data options. You're gonna start out selling cash secured puts, so you're gonna sell some puts on the S and P or on your favorite stocks, and then you're going to keep doing that unless the market goes down enough that you get a sign on that put and you take a loss. Then you long that stock, and then you're gonna sell some calls against it and have a covered call strategy until the stock rallies enough that that call gets assigned, your stock gets taken away, then you sell a put, and so it's sort of you know, the end. The way they'll describe this is it's almost as if it's this continuous money machine, because all of these outcomes are good. If the stock doesn't move, you get the premium, that's good. If the stock goes down, you get the stock cheap, that's good.
And you're sort of you keep moving with the market, right, and the one thing you know is the market's gonna move. Probably.
It seems like there's some assumed mean reversion here. The cycle of life.
Yeah, there's very much like a cycle of life. There's this idea that no matter what scenaari, there's a justification for how anything that can happen is sort of good. You know, the stock goes up, you made money. You didn't make as much money as you would if you hadn't sold the call, but you still made money. And then if it goes down, the same thing like you. And ultimately, what's not described in these pitches is how this is a it's a short volatility trade. What you're exposed to is the stock going down a lot and then back up a lot, and then down a lot and back up a lot. Right, Because what happens is stock goes down a lot, you're going to lose money on your short put. Now you're gonna get assigned the stock. You're going to sell a call. What if the market goes back up a lot. Well, now you didn't make money on the reversion because you're short of call and you're just getting chopped up by this volatility. Right. So people love to pitch options trades in ways that don't have anything to do with volatility, when they're inherently volatility trades, right, they like to pitch them as you know. One of my least favorite phrases, right is people will say, these influencers will say, selling a put is just like having a limit order out there in the market to buy a stock really cheap, but you get paid for it, So it has nothing to do with the price, has nothing to do with it. If this is like a good risk reward for the premium that you're getting, it's as if you can just buy a stock for really cheap when it goes down and you get paid for it.
Do we have any historical data on how these have performed in the past, so most of them are new. So I imagine we have finite information about performance.
Yeah, totally. If you look at benchmark indices for things like call over writing or cash secured put selling, those have been around for a very long time and they know back tested, way way back. So there's something called BxM index on Bloomberg that you can pull up, and something called put put index on Bloomberg that you can pull up for call writing and put writing. And what you see there is it actually tells a really nice story, which is from about nineteen ninety line going up from about the lines going up from about and you want to compare that to just the SMP. So from nineteen ninety to about twenty twelve they look pretty good. They kind of keep up on average with the SMP, but on somewhat lower volatility with a little bit lower draw downs. And that was really the pitch that investment consultants and pension fund consultants started making after the credit crisis to their clients.
Is this what made off claim to be doing some sort of like right.
He was claiming to be doing like conversions and like diagonal spreads and stuff, so like a little bit funkier stuff. But yeah, he was out there saying, oh, we're doing this kind of really cute option stuff. So this stuff again, it it looked recent decent in this sort of back test, and but the whole point is of you know, very much like any back test in finance, option selling looked good when nobody was doing it in size right, there were it was not you know, option markets were backwater. There were funny little things that some hedge a few hedge funds did and a few kind of people, but there were no giant pension two hundred million dollar pension funds doing like option selling. And then those pension fund consultants started writing white papers and they started pitching to their clients' boards, and by like twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, they started to get some traction, and you started to have you know, giant two hundred million dollar pension funds saying sure, we'll put ten percent of our assets and move it from equity into option selling. And that grew and grew and grew and grew and grew, and so what you ended up with then is volatility term structures steepened, which means that short dated options that were getting sold really heavily went down in price because that's what everybody was selling. And what happened was you see the performance then of in kind of the out of sample period, if you want to think of it that way, from a back test for BxM and put index, which are the benchmarks for this kind of stuff, then really deteriorated relative to S and P, where they sort of had very similar risk but much less return. And that was like, how does this actually look once real money goes into these strategies, Because at the end of the day, derivatives' markets are big and deep in liquid, but they're not primary markets, right, They're derivatives markets. You can't they're not designed for like global asset allocation for twenty percent of the of all the money in the world to go into selling them, right.
But this is the big debate, right to what extent is this kind of options trading or derivatives trading action affecting the underlying which would be the market or you know, something like the VIX and you hear different sides to the story. So you have some people arguing that actually one of the key reasons the VIX has been kind of subdued recently is because of all this short dated trading then you have you know, entities like the CBOE arguing for obvious reasons, perhaps that actually the gamma exposure from the short dated options isn't that big, certainly not big enough to move the full huge market. It sounds like you land on the first one.
Yeah, the size of short dated options selling is very, very large. It's very very one way, and there's different flows in different parts of the option market, right, But if you look at one month range options that are not that far out of the money, call it like twenty five delta put wing to call wing, the overwhelming end user of that product is selling it for income or for you know, for a asset allocation type of strategy. And what that means is, you know, the all of the flows on the floor for brokers and banks are giant trades to sell constantly, and the people that are buying them are people like us who are buying them because they're too cheap, not because we have any other reason to buy them. Right, So go ahead, job, No.
This is sort of where I was going to follow on to Tracy's question. I mean, if we were having this conversation in twenty nineteen, what are the fingerprints that are visible in the market. Obviously, volume is clear, I mean, but in terms of the fingerprints of when it comes to price, what are the fingerprints of all of this retail and now institutional money flowing into this space? And I presume to some extent the reason you have a business is because there are these fingerprints.
What do they look like? Yeah? Absolutely so. Taking this example of short data options selling, for instance, the first thing you want to look at is the relative price. And what is that In the world of options in volatility, it's the term structure of volatility, which means where is implied volatility for the S and P for example, which is one of the biggest parts of this ecosystem for very short term options one month, two month, three month, six month, one year. And what does that term structure look like if you compare it to history, And what you'll find is really in the evolution that you've had in that post twenty twelve regime has been the volatility term structure getting steeper and steeper and steeper, so lower in the front and steeper and steeper kind of all the way out to the back. And the reason for that, again is that the front is being sold very, very very heavily, and people who are getting put into a lot of the front, like market makers and like volatility arbitrazures, then have to go further out the curve to hedge. You see that very distinctly. Another thing you can look at is volatility risk premium, which is something you kind of have to estimate and look at empirically. It's not just the shape of a volatility term structure. That is what is implied volatility relative to subsequent realized volatility. So implied volatility is supposed to be forecasting realized volatility how much the market actually moves, and the spread between those two is a risk premium. If you're selling options, you should get paid a risk premium. It's a risky, long beta kind of thing to do, so you should get paid some amount of money for that. In the old days, before twenty twelve, you used to get paid a decent amount of money for that, maybe three volatility points on average. In the more recent years, that compresses and compresses down to one point or half a point, and then you know, kind of to Joe's point, that will blow out a little bit after a major market crash for a little while.
And then you dive in exactly. Okay.
One other I think you said you die, that's actually.
Either dive in.
Okay.
One other thing I want to ask about is, of course, multi strategy hedge funds. So we did a bunch of episodes on these and options trading derivatives came up quite a bit, especially in things like the dispersion trade, and one thing sticks with me. We spoke to a guy called I think it was Krishna Kumar. Is that right, Krishna Kumar, and he made the point that at multistrat funds, you're not trying to maximize long term returns. You're trying to maximize returns per unit of time, in which case options sound pretty good for doing that.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. So, you know, multistrats are a very interesting business. But I think part of what you're getting at is one thing that they do very well from a business standpoint is they have a very short leash on portfolio managers and on pods. They're notorious for firing you very quickly if you start to lose any material amount of money, and that's a risk management thing for them, right, And so there's this idea that gosh, I'm probably only going to be here for like a year or two or three, So I sure better just make a whole bunch of money as fast as I can, and if it goes really poorly, then it goes poorly, right. But and so you're incentivized to do negatively skewed things. Now, the multistrats have very good risk management. They know this. They're you know, they're not silly, So they're not going to just let you go sell a whole bunch of options, you know, naked and a bunch of puts and see how that goes. But you can definitely try to do more creative things that look a little bit more like relative value and maybe sneak through the risk systems a little bit better, at least in some size. You know, Dispersion can be one of those things. Depending on again who's looking at it and how sophisticated they are. You can have a dispersion trade where you're buying some single name options, you're selling a lot more index options. You're saying, look, this is really correlation, it's not volatility. But depending on the hedge ratio that you're using, it might just actually be a very short ball behaving thing where you tend to make money for a year or two or three, but then it goes really poorly eventually, and you see a lot of that. There's dispersions very popular in the multistrats. You know, a year or two ago, there were many, many, many pods at some of the big multistrats that we all know about. Dispersion that's shrunk very dramatically because P and L has been relatively poor. It's very cyclical. Multi strats are a fascinating thing in that regard that the end result to the you know, to the buyer of the multi strat tends to be pretty good because they cut off the tails by doing this rapid sort of yeah, stop out of PM, but it comes with a lot of weird incentives.
An episode that I'd love to do that will probably that will probably never do, is talk to a multi strat PM essentially about how they gained the risk parameters that are imposed on them by their manager. Maybe we could talk to a risk manager and a retired pe yeah, and how they sort of try to find pennies in front of steamroller strategies that will work for a year or two before they get fired, before they're just sort of identified as having done that all right, here's another question. I don't get certain assets like bitcoin or micro strategy, which is you know, an exotic wrapper of bitcoin in some way are extremely volatile that and that's part of the fun, I guess, like that, why is there the appetite for even layering on more volatility? So there exists, like you know, there's like a three x micro strategy ETF. Who is the like customer for like, you know what micro strategy? Just not volatile enough for me? Not enough daily not enough daily swings here or like what's good?
Like it reminds me of remember the like multi blade razor commercial and why we have three blades? We have four blades?
Why why not have a ten xm micro strategy ETF? Why stop at three?
Absolutely no, that it's it's really fascinating. My best sense, you know, from watching Twitter and people asking me questions is you know, there's this there's a community of people and kind of a voice for Hey, look I've only got twenty thousand dollars. Yeah, and I don't want to work my job at Starbucks anymore. Yeah, how am I going to really make it? And this idea that you can really make it and you can kind of get rich from only having twenty thousand dollars, and how are you going to do that? You need as much leverage as you can possibly imagine. Right, So cryptos and attractives because of this, because some of the things in crypto that you can do get one hundred times leverage or something. Right, So if that's your benchmark, actually three x mstrs is relatively boomer. Exactly, it's pretty boomer. But yeah, these ETFs exist, and they're really fascinating because normally the way that a leverage GTF works is that the ETF fishuer will do a swap with a bank and get some get two x leverage or get three x leverage, and it's a fairly simple and clean thing. But no bank is going to give you three x leverage on micro strategy, right because the wipeout risk possibility is very is very real. The collateral is not going to cover a massive move down in micro strategy. And so what you would think of is vanilla things is just a leverage GTF. It's not a crazy derivatives thing. Actually it is, because they have to buy call options in order to have a risk profile that's acceptable, but generates the leverage that they need. And so what that means is these things are really big and they actually dominate the options market on you know, some of these underlyings and you know, micro strategy can go up a bunch and this huge etr this triple levered ETF has this giant call options position that's now deep in the money and illiquid, and it has to go out and like roll and buy a ton more of this of you know, call options on micro strategy when there's very little appetite from the dealer community to provide liquidity on that. Yeah, and it's a you know, a big.
Mess other options on the three X micro strategy ETF.
I would actually have to check some of the leverage some of the LeVert ETFs actually do. And yeah, we it's kind of a running joke, right is you've got like the you've got like the triple levered you know et F on the thing. You've got the covered call selling ETF on that thing. You got people running the wheel strategy on that just in sort of an infinite recursion of you know, option selling abyss.
Amazing just going by to options influencers. So one thing that you see a law is not necessarily like here is an options trade that will make you a bunch of money. But here's how you really make money in options by selling? Yes, how do you make money in options by selling? Like I get the sense that it's not just it's not just you buy a put, it's something else.
You're exactly right. So normally, the way a derivative trader would think about it trade is what is this trade? What is the price, what's the upside, what's the downside? Why should I do this trade? That's not really the approach with options influencing. It's this idea of this cheap code in markets, right where people just don't know this one cool trick and I'm going to show you for only ninety nine dollars a month, right, And the typical pitch again is you're just going to be doing some combination. Maybe you're selling puts, maybe you're selling calls, maybe against stock, maybe not. And the idea is they're pitched in terms of the premiums that you're selling are like income, and we just talk about how much money you're making solely in terms of how much premium you're generating from option sales. And that's why it's like, oh, I can make two hundred thousand dollars a year on a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar account. But obviously that's not your profit from the trades. You're just doing trades and you're selling that pinion. But you might lose money. You might lose money on those trades. Yeah, right, you're that's not income. And you know, I get a little bit triggered by the use of the word income with respect to this stuff, because like, income to me is like you own some treasury bills, right and you're making four percent and you don't just suddenly lose thirty percent on your income thing, right, Like it's you know, these are trades, but this community is not expressing what is this trade, Why is it good? When is it good, what's the price? What's going on. It's just saying, look, you can just sell these options and this is income, right, which is totally crazy.
So people come to you from time to time. Your a voice of reason. When we had you back on a few years ago, you know, people reach out like, oh, I really want to learn more. I imagine that getting into options is a little bit like converting to Judaism, where the rabbi is supposed to send you away three times and say no, just buy a S and P five hundred index CTF. Don't do it. But and then finally, if they keep knocking at their door, then like, okay, maybe we'll teach you something. Where should you start? If you're like actually serious and like you know, I do know most of the time you're like, just buy an ETF and.
Live your life. That's what a perfect analogy. Thank you?
Well, where would you say? We're going to get DMS?
After this?
I want to learn more about how to do it right? Is there a way to start to learn to do it right?
Yeah?
Absolutely. Usually the first thing that I do is I send people kind of collect a thread that has a collection a lot of people contributed to on good reading material and stuff on how to educate yourself about options and how to use them and what they are and how to think about the risk and all this stuff. So that's a really good kind of first thing to do to just have some kind of clue what you're doing. And then you know, the next thing that I tell people is what do I think are kind of reasonably safe uses of options that if you really want to dedicate time to figuring this out, you might kind of start with right, And so I'll say, look, if you have some kind of fundamentally driven or tactically driven process with for coming up with a view on STEF, and you have a timing view, then sure could you use a call spread or a put spread to express that view? You say, oh, I really like earnings on this on Tesla, like next week, could you buy a two week call spread around the range where you think the stock could trade to And you can obviously make money or lose money, but you know exactly how much money are risking. Yeah, it's kind of a safe thing. You're not going to just blow up one day on that. I think that's kind of okay. If you really need a little bit of kind of cash efficiency or leverage, again not too crazy. You know, you can do things like buy a combo in the option market, or buy a call and sell a put that give you a very similar profile to buying a stock but are a little more cash efficient. If you just really feel like you need fifty percent leverage, you know, or something like that. And if you want to be really thoughtful about options selling, you know, to try to generate yield over time, there's ways to do that. Too, But you really have to read up to understand how to think about the risk award of a trade that you're doing, not just believe there's something you can do all the time because somebody told you it's a great idea.
Your favorite options blow up or derivatives blow up. And I'll say I'm partial to Vallmageddon in twenty eighteen because I wrote a lot about it, and I'm still traumatized by the reaction of vol twit when I said it was going to blow up when the vix was going up. But what's your favorite?
Well, Vallmageddon is a great one. You know, you've talked about that. Everybody everybody else has two, So I'll give you something else. I mean, I think possibly my favorite was was alions Structured Alpha, which blew up in twenty twenty in March, and the reason was, you know, the Allions is a huge sort of safe conservative firm that everybody would look and say, oh, they would never be doing something kind of crazy, right, because it's you know, they're very buttoned up, they're very serious people. They own Pimco and so they but they had these French kind of option traders and Joe laughs. It's always there. It's always the French. There's just something in the DNA. And you know, they were doing something where they would effectively they would usually sell downside put spreads. They'd sell a put and then they'd buy back a lower strike. That was the main They'd do a few other things like that. Didn't think of that as like the core thing they were doing, right, and that's kind of safeish, right, you're getting some a credit if you're earning some premium, but like you're supposed to know how much you can lose. Yeah, and then but their returns were pretty good. They actually kind of kept up with equity markets, which didn't really make a whole lot of sense. And it turned out the way that they were doing that was that they were just not buying back the downside put or buying or they were buying it back but like way way way lower strike than they said that they were buying it back, right, so that's obviously one way to make more money. Kind of that sounds really bad. Yeah, that was really bad, and they they were doing that for years and years and they actually it's really great. There's a whole SEC complaint about this. You can read all the details. They had to show this to investors what they were doing, right, because that's part of the business. And so they had spreadsheets with all these kind of hard coded cells and made up numbers to sort of be able to lie to investors and say that they were doing what they said they were doing when they weren't. And because that's complicated to manage to have all these big spreadsheets faking your returns and faking your risk and everything. Then they had a word document with an eight team points on like how to do all of the lying and number printing for all their analysts to be able to follow, and you know it instructions on how to not hover the how do you structured alpha Greg Toront and it's like, you know, don't hover your mouse over a formula. It's supposed to be a formula, but it is hard coded because the investor might see the stuff like that, right, And you know, with very detailed emails on all this kind of how to lie kind of kind of stuff, the fun and then what happened was, you know, obviously in March of twenty twenty, the market went down a lot, so their fund was down much more than it should have been because they weren't actually buying back the insurance that they were supposed to be, and so what do you do obviously in that circumstance, Well, maybe you could hedge, or maybe you could kind of come clean. What they actually did was they went to the vix options market and they say, gosh, why don't we just sell a massive amount of vix calls because then when everything comes back, we'll just make that money back and we won't have to tell anybody we lost money.
This SEC complaint is amazing. Defendants reduced losses under a market crash scenario in one risk report send to investor from negative forty two point one five zero five seven four eight nine seven five five seven four seven percent to negative four point one zero. They just removed a number.
That's rights. They just took off a decimal took off, that's right. It was all just hard coded. They didn't like, they didn't have some sophisticated methodology for this. They literally just type the numbers into the spreadsheets.
Sometimes and it gets this gets to the I mean, to be honest, you don't really even need to be French to do that's right, Like any I could have come up with I could have come up with this one. I don't need to go to strategy, I don't need to go to air call polytechnique to come up with They.
Just go to sell C six. So you just overwrite the number.
Some people do screw up math, like some even sophisticated traders like sometimes math is tough.
At this level. Yeah, but no, this was not sophisticated. This was just you type over the cell. And so what happened was they sold lots of vix calls with the front month of exed futures at about twenty five, and then the front month of fixed features went to eighty five, and so they were they were liquidated middle of March in the huge catastrophic explosion that people like us were shown the auction and everything, and they drove the relative price of the Vick's options and futures to twice as high as it had ever been relative to S and P. In this sort of spectacular implosion, you know, they went to zero. They lost billions and billions of dollars for you know, teachers, pensions and all this kind of stuff in just total and utter fraud again at a very big buttoned up place, and actually one of the one of the funny takeaways from it was in all of the lawsuits, you know, leons stepped up and settled lots of lawsuits and paid investors back, you know, all this money and cost them many billions of dollars. And so actually, in a twisted sort of way, the logic of investing with the big safe place actually worked. But it wasn't because they managed the risk or had any idea what these guys were doing, and it was just that you could sue them and they would pay you.
Since you mentioned PIMCO, one of the interesting things about PIMCO is, as you said, there is this perception that they're sort of like an old school just buying bond type fund burgers and bonds. That's right, But actually if you look at their portfolio and talk to people who are actually doing these trades, there are a lot of derivatives involved. There is like Euro dollar futures and swaps things like that. Do you see the explosion of derivatives trading reflected in fixed income as well? Like the type that we see in equities that we've been talking about, is that happening in fixed income too?
Very much? So? So I actually had a little poll I put out on Twitter the other day, which was you know, who do you think is the best derivatives trader of all time? And my choices were Bill Gross of PIMCO, Warren Buffett, Who else was it? Oh Yaes of Susquehanna and Jim Simon's of Renaissance. And everybody was really confused because they're like, none of these people are derivati Well, jeff yass is a derivative trade, but all these other guys are what are you talking about, Warren Buffett? But yeah, Bill Gross has traded more derivatives notional than the GDP of the world. They're you know, massive traders of things like futures. As you point out in fixed income also, Bill Gross and PIMCO was by far the biggest option seller in the fixed income complex for many, many years, or tens of billions of dollars of piano. People don't really think about this, right, They think, oh, it's kind of boring bond stuff. But no, there's massive involvement of you know, big sophisticated institutions in you know, all of these spaces. So like retail investors aren't involved in fixed income volatility because they don't really have an instrument to do that. I mean, they could trade like treasury futures options, but that's kind of like a weird funk thing. They don't You don't really have listed options that people can sell as easily. But you know, big institutions have been involved in this stuff for a very long time.
I guess it's probably coming. If it makes people money, I'm sure there's going to be you could sickorize it. Yeah.
Absolutely. They made a vix for fixed income called move mov Oh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, Ben, that was so much fun and we so enjoyed having you back, and you're going to have to come back on the show relatively soon, as soon as we have a blow up.
Come back.
Yeah.
We'll definitely be calling Ben the next time there's a blow up.
That's actually a recurring theme in our right. I do a talk with you guys about something, and then it blows up, and then you bring me back to talk about how it blew up.
Consider this a warning.
Can I just this one more quick question?
Of course?
Why like you lay out these with the buffery tfs and all this stuff, and like how really like they don't get you what they think? Do you have a theory for I get it for retail, the person at Starbucks who wants to find a way to get leverage on that much cash, Now, why is it so big elsewhere?
So a big part of it is that the kinds of institutions involved in these type of trades are just are very slow moving and very backward looking, and they're not that sensitive to performance outside of like catastrophic events. Yeah. Right, So if you think of like a typical pension fund, it took the consultants like three years to get this call overwriting stuff through the board in the first place, and then they put on the trade that they put it on with a couple of managers that they like, and they go out to dinner with them once a year. It's in the it's a footnote in a long report on performance. And as long as it's just kind of my underperforming expectations, like, nobody cares if it blows up. That's a different thing. But this kind of thing doesn't really blow up, not the kind of strategies that the institutions are doing. Yeah, that retail is different, but you know, call overwriting, you know, call unlovered, call over writing doesn't blow up. It just underperforms in their performance. It's gonna take them ten years to ever decide to stop.
All right, Ben Iffer until the next blow up.
I guess wonderful guys, really fun.
Joe. That was fun.
I love talking to Ben because he's a funny, fun guy and also just explains things really well.
I'm wondering, should we get the she Wolf of Indian options on together with Ben to fight it out.
Yeah, let's just do just a rigorous one on one debate about whether you can really earn one hundred ten minutes. It's really funny that they actually like as a regulator, They're like, you have to stop this, that you have to get out of the market.
Yeah. But I also think it's an important episode because if I was going to pinpoint one thing that has really changed in the market recently, it would be I guess a pervasive sense of short termism on the part of investors, and options fit perfectly into that, right, Like why wait ten years to make a decent reliable return when you can buy zero DT options and make a bunch of money in a day.
You know.
The line between investing and speculating or investing in gambling has always been a blurry one. Right, that's just a fact. But then you see things like, you know, prediction market platforms where you can invest, you know, make bets on where the FED is going to go right alongside, like bets on you know, who's going to win the coin flip of the Super Bowl and stuff. Or you see like Robin Hood selling futures on who's going to win Super Bowl football game or whatever. The line is gone, like it's still a spectrum, I guess, but the idea that there's any sort of bright line or line at all between the two things like there's no line anymore.
Yeah, well, shall we leave it there.
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the Authots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Ben Eiffert. He's back on Twitter after a hiatus. He's at Ben Piffert. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, dash O Bennett at Dashbock and Kelbrooks at Kelbrooks. For more odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots where we have a newsletter and a blog, and you can check out all of these topics twenty four to seven in our discord discord dot gg slash.
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