The airline industry had its share of bad press last week mainly due to the Sunwing incident, but Air Canada still managed to outperform. On Friday, July 7th, its shares price surged to 19.06$, its highest price in the last ten years following a very optimistic Q2 outlook. In the world of options, it represented a great...
There are three situations in which options can be used to take advantage of changes in the price of an underlying stock: when prices rise, when they fall, and when they enter a relatively stable period. In this article, I will examine how to benefit from a relatively stable stock price. More specifically, we will look at an...
The Black-Scholes formula is an option valuation model developed by two academics, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, who first described it in a 1973 article. The article appeared in the same year that the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) was founded, and the model effectively democratized the use of options. Previously,...
Holding shares in a company gives the shareholder the following rights:*The right to transfer ownership, *The right to dividends, *Voting rights, and *The right to residual income and assets. What this means is that shareholders are free to sell their shares, take dividends when they are paid, vote at shareholder meetings and...
I have been told frequently – and surely so have you – that selling cash-secured puts is a very risky strategy. Haven’t you? The main reason put forward for not using this strategy is that you could be forced to buy the security, even if the company had just gone bankrupt. In this light, the strategy rightly raises fears....
Cenovus stirred up the Canadian oil industry back on March 29th with an announcement on the $17.7 billion-dollar purchase of ConocoPhillips’ Canadian oil sand assets. To say the deal was not well received is an understatement as the stock dropped over 10% on the announcement and continued to actively distribute lower. From...
As we saw in an earlier article, delta measures how much an option’s price moves in relation to a change in the price of the underlying asset. Delta is a variable from the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and it is also used in the industry as an approximation of the probability that the option will be in-the-money at...
Option pricing, or insurance, is a relative value product. For instance, a $300 annual premium for $1 million of life insurance coverage for a young, healthy individual is reasonable. However, that same $300 price tag to insure a 65 year-old smoker with high blood pressure is way too cheap. When it comes to life...