Yeah I wasn't referring to myself, I was referring to the world leaders above and their inner circles. They know what actions or words will catalyze large moves in our markets. We don't have the luxury of knowing what they'll say or do in advance, but their lackeys do and it would be naive to assume gaming substantial amounts of index options in advance doesn't occur. For you to make a killing doing this you'd need to be incredibly lucky, have a crystal ball, or a direct line to the powers that be.
But to answer your question Vince, if you had this info you would use the nearest time frame and the farthest strike out based on your assessment of the magnitude of the move. Say it's Wednesday at noon Eastern and the Q's are trading at $350. You know your buddy Vlad is gonna do or say something stupid within the next two hours that will create a sharp down spike in the indexes. (Or Kim is gonna launch an ICBM over Japan, or Xi is gonna announce he's kicking AMZN out of China... whatever) You'd buy something like the $343 puts that expire at 4:15 EST that day for something like $.05/contract at the ask, because that's about where they'd be trading. Probably with no bid. The Q's suddenly start dropping on the news, and before you know it, those contracts you paid a nickel for are now worth $2+ and climbing. Same thing in reverse. Putin says he's pulling back and meeting with Biden. The $357 calls go from a nickel to.... however high the markets run. If they go to $362, you turned $5 into $500 or $10K into $1MM. You just became a millionaire from nothing in the space of an hour because you knew.
"Russia will in principle be cut off from international financial markets," the EU boss told German television channel ARD late on Sunday evening. And she added that Russia will also be deprived of "all the goods that we make that Russia urgently needs to modernize and diversify its economy, and for which it has no replacement itself." This will crash the Russian economy completely as Russia needs the international markets to finance investments in their economy. Russia has also no up to date factories and depends for almost all high tech from the West. Gazprom can not do maintenance to their installations as this is done by US an EU companies. Nordstream2 was build with Western knowlegde and when a Swiss company stopped working in Russia, the Nordstream 2 pipeline construction was halted a very long time. It took Russia a long time to fix that and they were lucky it was no high tech they had to fix themselves. Oil and gas industry,which represents more than 50% of the budget Russia needs, will suffer hard.
in sports bets....that like +1000 in payout that you know townsend was winning the 3 points contest. my play is with high probablity the spy is gonna continue to go down in the foreseable future...either due to russia invading or something else. i want don't want that crazy payout like $5 to $500. i want to risk like turning $1000 to $5000. what is the safest option play to do? i heard you buy options far in advance like 6 months or more so you can get out with little loss if you are wrong.
When I made this post last Oct: https://elitetrader.com/et/threads/es-journal-2021-2022.353736/page-270#post-5468354 I looked at the June 16 IWM $200 puts and as I recall, they were right around $6. Don't hold me to that as an exact figure but its close. Even the December 2022's were about $11 if I recall. I'd have to load my software for the exact figures, but either way, I had a feeling the Russel was gonna pull back to at least the $200 level. So this is exactly what you're saying you're looking for. If you look at those puts now, the June $200's are $13 and the December are about $25. So ballpark, you doubled your money off an 8.5% move in an index in the space of 4 months, but you gave yourself 8 months if you bought the June puts when the post was made in Oct. And this is a great example too, because the Russell kept climbing after I wrote that. Again without my software loaded, I don't know how low the price of those puts went when it topped around $242, but I can promise you they were way less than $6, so you'd have been staring at a substantial loss for a month or so if you didn't stick to your convictions. The other thing is, back in October/November most folks would have thought a 10% on that index to the downside would be impossible. So the puts were relatively cheap. Right now the vix is way up, so if you look at the Dec $370's today on the SPY, they're pricey. $15 for a ~15% down move from here. To make 3X your money, you'll need a 25% drop from here between now and Dec. The sooner it happens, the more you'll make above that 3X as time is your friend but also your enemy. At a minimum however, if the SPY drops to $325, a 25% move between now and next Dec, your $1500 will be worth $4500+.
for me a drop to $325 is highly unlikely bets. i'm looking at a drop to around $400. the puts option is around $1500. if it does drop to $400 (that's about -7.7%) between now and 7/15/22 of the spy...how much do you think can i make for that put option play?
Russia would not be kicked off Swift in any initial sanctions if they invade. You don't go to DevCon 1 (rhetorically speaking) right away.
Was to expect. For many Russian companies what Putin is doing is a nightmare. Many businesses will be ruined if Putin invades Ukraine. Putin will do it in the "KGB way": killing, poisoning, kidknapping and torturing people(even abroad), give the Donbass Russians military support and let them do the job, destabilize Ukraine with bombs placed by FSB people, cyber attacks on internet in Ukraine and anywhere else. Use gas as a weapon. And of course produce lots of fake news. And the US and EU will do nothing. They should play the same game.