Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

If you are the only person who thinks that it might fail, one cent put options will be free and you can buy them until the price hits zero, and then you can make a cent.

For example, the opportunity to sell $TSLA for $180 in one month costs about thirty cents right now. Keeping this up for ten years would cost $36.

View on HN

It doesn't work like this. The stock might fall around $10-$20 every month in the worst case scenario. In which case the premium of $180 will keep rising every week, 90% of which will expire worthless.

You have to buy really farther out or really far off strike both of which have nearly zero probability ( delta is nearly zero and less than 1)

That'd work well for a catastrophic Eron-style collapse, but many companies die a slow death, like Sears.

With Sears like companies you can take a very small short position and then reinvest the money from the sale going long S&P500 type stuff. That's roughly what Chanos did. It has to be small position as a percent of your portfolio in case it decides to go up 10x when you are not looking. I think Chanos's results over a decade were something like 0% on the shorts, 50% on the longs the money was reinvested into.

Put options are worthless once the price of a stock hits $0. At that point, the stock will be frozen and/or de-listed and your ability to exercise your put will be gone.

There are otc buyers for these, but they probably won’t look at $36

Per grok it's not true and per me it's not a problem in practice.

A put option is a contract between buyer (me) and a seller of the option. The contract guarantees me a right to sell stock at a strike price to the seller of the option.

If current stock price is lower than put contract strike price, I can exercise the contract and make money: I buy the stock from market at e.g. $78 (current price) and sell at e.g. $128 (strike price).

If stock is delisted the contract is still valid and enforced by the clearing house. They'll just assume that current price is $0 and force the option seller to just fork me cash without receiving the (unavailable) shares.

But it doesn't happen in practice because stocks are not just delisted without warning.

For example, Bed Bath & Beyond announced bankruptcy in April 23, Nasdaq announced delisting in April 25 and trading stopped in May 3.

So there was a week for option holders to settle their trades.

Grok is not a reliable source. What will happen is that if you are lucky, some institution with worthless shares will buy them from you at a very big discount OTC. If you are not lucky and your broker sleeps on you (since that deal comes from your broker calling someone on the phone, it's not automated), you will lose the options.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com