Investing Curiouscatblog

Tag: options

  • Spread Betting and Contracts for Difference

    I am largely a fundamental investor with the long term time horizon that fits such investing. I however am also a believer in using some more speculative investing for a portion of a portfolio if it fits the risk profile of an investor.

    If you are not comfortable with the risk of an investment most of the time you shouldn’t make that investment. There is a bit of a conflict, for example, where an investor is scared of any loss from say an investment in a stock market index and trying to save for retirement on a median level income. It is nearly impossible to save for retirement without investing in stocks if you are not already rich, so as with most investment advice there is a bit of difficulty at the extremes but in general investors shouldn’t take on risk they are not comfortable with.

    For experienced investors with a high level of financial literacy more speculative options can have a useful role in a portfolio. Though you should realize most people fail with speculation, so you have to be realistic about your prospects. I have used speculative investments including naked short selling, leverage (margin) and options.

    Spread betting is another speculative strategy that can play a part in an investment portfolio. Spread betting is not allowed in the USA (with our highly regulated personal investing environment but is available in most other countries). They are somewhat similar to binary options (which are allowed in the USA) and to futures contracts (they are not the same, just those are comparable to get some idea of how you would use them in a portfolio).

    Spread betting really is a bet on what will happen. You don’t buy a financial instrument. You place a bet with a company and if the prices move for you and you close the position with a gain they pay out a gain to you and if you close out the position with a loss your capital held with them is reduced by your loss amount.

    Since the price to control a position is much less than the notional position size there is a large degree of leverage which increases the affect of gains and loses. Since positions can move against you and must be settled if the loss exceed your deposit with the company you are trading with having a substantial cash cushion is the way I would use such a speculative account. If I decided I could afford to risk losing $5,000 I would deposit that amount.

    My purchases would about 10% of the capital in the account (so $500 at first). If that is leveraged at 20 to 1 (just requiring 5% down on margin), that would make my effective leverage just 2 to 1. But if I added other positions that would increase my leverage, say 2 more purchases and my leverage would be 6 to 1.

    The way I have managed the speculative portion of my portfolio is to fund it and then pull off part of the gains to my long term portfolio and retain part of the gains to build my speculative account. It isn’t really quite that clear as I have different level of speculation in my portfolio. Options are speculative but have a limit of 100% loss. Selling stocks short (naked shorting) is speculative but has theoretically unlimited losses. Using margin on regular stocks has the potential to lose more than you have invested though most of the time you should be stopped out before the losses are too much beyond your entire account value.

    So I don’t really have a clear cut speculative portfolio but I roughly follow that procedure. I have added to the speculative portion when I have had very large gains in a particular portion of my main portfolio.

    Another factor with spread betting, shorting and options is that they can actually be used to reduce the risk of your overall portfolio using certain strategies. If you believe there is a risk for a market downturn but don’t want to sell any of your stock holdings you can use spread betting to create a position that will gain if the market declines. That gain then will offset the likely loss on your stock positions thus reducing you risk in a market decline.

    Of course, if you do that and the market moves up you will create a loss on you spread betting position that offsets your gains on your stock positions. You could also bet against specific stocks that you think will decline more in a market decline and seek to increase your return of course that has risks (including the market declining along with your stocks but that stocks you bet against could move against you anyway). I have used this strategy with selling stocks short occasionally.

    An additional risk to consider with spread betting is you need to find a company you trust to be around to pay off your gains. You would want to examine the safety of your funds and that (in the UK) the account is covered by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and complies with the FCA’s Client Assets provisions (and in other countries they have similar coverage). To be safe you should consider whether holding more than the covered amount is wise in your account. The last 10 years have provided examples of the riskiness of financial companies going out of business; that your funds wouldn’t be accessible is a risk that must be considered.

    Related: Shorting Using Inverse Funds – Books on Trading and Speculating in Financial Markets – Selling Covered Call Options

  • Binary Options

    Options can be used as an aggressive strategy to make money with investments. By following news events for quite a few different companies you can put yourself in the position to act when stories break, or events occur which can cause mini trends in their stock price.

    Volatile stocks with frequent news provide the opportunity to make money on large changes in price. Amazon is a company an Amazon that often makes headlines. Recently, they have been in the news quite a bit, and savvy binary options traders have been cleaning up.

    Binary options are a type of option in which the payoff can take only two possible outcomes. The cash-or-nothing binary option pays some fixed amount of cash if the option expires in-the-money while the asset-or-nothing pays the value of the underlying security.

    For example, a purchase is made of a binary cash-or-nothing call option on Amazon at $320 with a binary payoff of $1000. Then, if at the future maturity date, the stock is trading at or above $320, $1000 is received. If its stock is trading below $100, nothing is received. An investor could also sell a put where they would make a payoff if the conditions are met and have to payoff nothing if the conditions are not met.

    Examples of big news in the recent past

    Amazon Fire Cell Phone – Earlier this year, we watched as Jeff Bezos unveiled the new Amazon Fire 3-D cell phone. As happens in most cases when a company unveils a great new product, we saw this cell phone cause Amazon’s stock price to go through the roof. So, as a trader, seeing the unveiling happen first hand would indicate that the value of Amazon was going to rise, and give the trader unique opportunity to make trades on realistic expectations with this asset.

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  • Apple’s Outstanding Shares Increased a Great Deal the Last Few Years

    One of the frustrating things for shareholders is how readily companies give away stock. A huge company like Apple has been giving away huge amounts of stock (through stock options) even while adding tens of billions in cash to their stockpile.

    Outstanding stock for Apple

    Jan 2006 – 848 million shares
    Jan 2007 – 862 million shares
    Jan 2008 – 879 million shares
    Jan 2009 – 891 million shares
    Jan 2010 – 907 million shares
    Jan 2011 – 921 million shares
    Jan 2012 – 932 million shares
    Jan 2013 – 939 million shares

    So even in the last year, while promoting a $10 billion buyback – the net result was 7 million more shares (not fewer as a “buyback” suggests); it did reduce the amount of increase to less than it has been recently. 7 million more shares * $425 = $2.975 billion more stock in place. If Apple uses $50 billion more to buy back stock that would allow purchase of 100 million shares at $500 a share ($500 is less than I would guess the average price will be, but we will see what actually happens). That would get the share balance back to the Jan 2006 level, if there were not huge new additions during the buyback period (which there probably will be).

    Companies certainly like to heavily publicize share buyback programs. They don’t trumpet how much additional stock they issue each year with the same zeal (most of which, for successful companies not in desperate need for cash, is provided through extremely sweetheart stock options for executives and board members at the expense of diluting stockholder’s equity – the easiest form of excessive executive pay to give away as it doesn’t cost the company cash).

    It will be interesting to see to what extent share buybacks actually decrease the share balance and to what extent they just eliminate the exploding issuance of shares Apple has engaged in while piling up the largest cash reserves ever recorded.

    Given Apple’s financial position I do not believe diluting stockholders equity by issuing huge amounts of stock was a wise policy the last 7 years. I think reversing that policy is wise. Buying back the stock they gave away is sensible but it would have been wiser not to give so much away in the first place. I’ll be surprised, and happy, if the outstanding share balance drops below 890 million (the Jan 2009 figure).

    I do think Apple is a great buy at these levels (I bought some more last week). The earnings reported today are not as spectacular as those reported recently but they still made a profit of $9.5 billion in the quarter (and had positive cash flow of $12.5 billion bringing total cash on hand to $145 billion). It isn’t like this is a company that is failing. It is just a company that isn’t growing earnings as rapidly. They are still earning enormous amounts of cash.

    The decline in margins is disappointing (but not surprising) but the margins are still great (just not as amazingly great as recently). The worry over further declines in margins seems justified to me and is one of the big risks for the stock going forward. I think margins will remains at a level that justifies a much higher price than the stock has today, but only time will tell.

    I would have liked to see the dividend increase more, but a dividend increase was a good move.

    Related: Is it Time to Sell Apple? – Apple’s Impossibly Good Quarter (Jan 2012) – Google to Let Workers Sell Options Online