I was an options trader at a leading Prop firm, ask me anything!

[Valuable_Two]

I worked for the better part of 10 years as an options trader at a leading Prop trading firm in Europe. For confidentiality reasons I don't want say which company (these firms are all incredibly secretive) but it's one of the top 5.

Happy to answer any interesting (general) questions you have about life as an options trader!

 

[FXX]

What instruments were you trading and what type of options?

I have been interested in this as I am fairly accurate on my trades but would like to remove money management which I see options as being a good path to achieving that simplification in my trading.

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

 

[Valuable_Two]

What instruments were you trading and what type of options?

For the most part I traded options on single stocks but also spent some time on index options and various delta 1 strategies

 

[Gustavo_ZAM]

Have you ever traded US equities?
I have some experience with options, but only as a hedging instrument. Do you believe strategies applied to options can be transferred over to equities? Thanks in advance

 

[Quiet1]

A few questions! I don't trade single stock options or even indexes really. I do trade other futures options but not as a market maker.

1. Would you say you ran short gamma or long gamma more often? Did you lean short gamma when vol is high or not that simple? Where do you think you made most of your p&l?

2. Can you give an example of a typical process for generating a new trade idea you used? Prop trading covers a wide variety of possibilities! Would you generally be looking to sell IV believing you could hedge realised more cheaply or which other strategies?

3. How did you actually incorporate 2nd order greeks into your risk management, assuming you did? Did you just come up with an estimate for dSigma/dSpot based on recent empirics and calculate total delta or what?

4. Are you able to discuss how frequently you delta-hedged?

5. Do you have any particularly interesting periods of trading, say for example during the recent VIX spike, that you could say you learned lessons from and what were they?

Thanks for taking questions!
Q1

 

[Valuable_Two]

Have you ever traded US equities?
I have some experience with options, but only as a hedging instrument. Do you believe strategies applied to options can be transferred over to equities? Thanks in advance

Can you be more specific? Options and equity markets are worlds apart in terms of strategies so I'm not sure one could be applied to the other so easily.

 

[Gustavo_ZAM]

Can you be more specific? Options and equity markets are worlds apart in terms of strategies so I'm not sure one could be applied to the other so easily.

Thanks for your reply.
I meant in terms of technical analysis. Are these strategies transferable to equities?

thanks in advance for your help and insights

 

[NVP]

I worked for the better part of 10 years as an options trader at a leading Prop trading firm in Europe. For confidentiality reasons I don't want say which company (these firms are all incredibly secretive) but it's one of the top 5.

Happy to answer any interesting (general) questions you have about life as an options trader!

hey V

are you still trading ?

N