Trade Update May 18th, 2012 at 11:50am: You guys know the drill here……With the XLF down more than 6.5% since buying the July 14/12/10 Put Fly last Friday I just sold half of this position at .41 for a double (stock ref $13.80), Now I can’t lose on the trade. I guess my thought here is that the market is getting a bit oversold, and the banks did lead the way, I am now looking for some of the Banks that have less European exposure that make a big part of the XLF (WFC & BRK/B) to play a little catch up….But in the meantime, barring a market crash, I would expect oversold names like C, MS and JPM to possibly find some footing in the next week.
I may be a tad early on taking my cost off of the table, but to be very honest, with the low premium that I paid, I got a little bigger in the position than I might have at this stage of the sell off, at this point now I have a very manageable position size.
ACTION:: SOLD to CLOSE Half July 14/12/10 Put Fly at .41 (paid .20 last Friday)
Original Post May 11th, 2012: XLF: The “Hard Trade” Here is Pressing the Short
JPM news last night implies much stricter controls on risk-taking for the other U.S. banks going forward. If you believed bank managements before that the bulk of their trading profits come from CLIENT positions, this should be enough to change your mind. Trading profits going forward will be significantly reduced for all the investment banking related names, Q2 earnings could reflect this foregone conclusion, but the outlook given on most of the conference calls in mid July will surely reflect this sentiment.
As we readers know we have a few outstanding trades that are short U.S. banks, but we want to throw out a low premium, low risk high reward trade that would benefit from a sort of perfect storm situation playing out by July expiration. While many individual bank stocks are getting a bit near term oversold, we want to take a look at the XLF. The XLF is a tricky etf as it’s make up is slightly divergent btwn U.S. centric “fortress” type names like WFC and BRK/B that make up almost 18% of the weighting in the top 3 of it’s holdings and then gets into the lower quality Europe exposed names like Citi, BAC and JPM. See weighting below.
TRADE: XLF ($14.87 ) Bought July 14/12/10 Put Butterfly for .20
-Bought 1 July 14 Put for .33
-Sold 2 July 12 Put at .08 each for a total of .16
-Bought 1 July 10 Put for .03
Break-Even on July Expiration:
Profits btwn 13.80 and 10.20 make up to 1.80 or 9x your money, max gain of 1.80 at 12.00, pay-out trails off btwn 12 and 10.20
Losses of up to .20 btwn 10.20 and 10 and btwn 13.80 and 14, max loss of .20 above 14 or below 10
TRADE RATIONALE: I don’t exactly want to press individual names here on the short side, we have been early on this trade and it is working and we have already take profits an half of MS and Citi Put Spreads, so we can’t lose on them. But now we want to play for the lights out redux of last summer as increased focus on banking regulation and a flare up of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis take down the other so called “best of breed” in the banking sector.
Not trying to confuse any of u, but a logical question would be why do the fly and not just the July 14/12 1×2 put spread, well for professionals we wouldn’t suggest to buy the July 10 put, but for those of us who have margin issues and risk management issues this can make sense just to buy that way downside wing to cover your arse.
One last point the bid ask is fairly wide, so if you trade these structures always use limits, when I Bought this fly the bid was .13 and the ask was .22, I first tried .19 bid and then .20 and got filled.