Writing Options As Opposed To Buying Options
So you’ve decided you want to use options in trading, but should you take the safe route of buying them, and only having a position in the underlying security if the market moves the direction you hoped? Or should you take the riskier route and be an option seller?
Selling options, sometimes also called writing options, is indeed riskier than buying them. An option buyer will only ever have a market position if it’s profitable. An option seller will only ever be assigned a market position if it’s a loss … and they can sometimes be quite a loss. The best thing that can happen to an option seller is that the option never moves in-the-money and it never gets exercised and it expires worthless.
Perhaps the easiest way to think about writing options is to compare it to writing an insurance policy. An insurance company accepts a premium from his customer, and if a certain condition happens (the customer’s car gets wrecked or the customer’s house burns down), the insurance company must honor its policy and pay for the damage. The insurance company surely hopes those conditions never happen, because then it could keep that customer’s premium along with the premiums of all its other customers. § Read the rest of this entry…