Expected Move: Looking For Trading Opportunities

In an earlier blog post, I discussed the ability to figure out the expected move based on volatility. Though there are extensive data science books written solely to extol the value of forecasting stock prices using statistical models and machine learnings, I prefer to rely upon  trusty volatility as basis for my predictions. Why? 1. It’s to-the-point and saves me the hassle of looking at the output of probability based forecasts from different statistical models. 2. There’s actual market participation. Volatility is driven by fear or greed in the market and can provide me with a more realistic and tangible understanding of expected movement.


While predicting the price of a stock  in the future might be a good research exercise, it is also a great tool for finding trading opportunities. If a stock or underlying has moved quickly to an extreme, I can take the contrarian view and fade the move.
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Let’s work with an example. The figure below shows different underlyings and their associated volatility tickers created by CBOE.

On Thursday evening Soybean (SOYB) had closed at $17.56. It’s volatility SIV had closed at 20.99. Based on this, the one day, one standard deviation move expected was $0.19. Here are the calculations:

But around noon the next day SOYB was trading at $17.98 which was more than twice the expected $0.19; SOYB had moved more than two standard deviations from the prior day’s expected move. The degree of confidence for a 2 SD move is about 95%, that is to say there was only 5% chance that market was expecting this kind of move! Given such an extreme move, as a contrarian, I’d fade the move to short soybeans. Since SOYB is thinly traded with wide bid-ask spreads, I’d short the futures /ZS or maybe even short a put along with it to add a positive theta component.
 
Here’s another exercise expected move with SPX and its volatility VIX. For now, let’s ignore the news surrounding the market: bulls vs. bears, political environment fueling the market, or how high it is. Let’s instead try to quantify it.
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I’m choosing the date of 2/11/16 which printed the lowest point in recent (short) memory – about 500+ days go. If we took the closing prices of 2/11/16, we can figure the expected move till today and see that SPX has been hovering pretty close to this number:

 
Here are all the standard deviations using 507 days since 2/11/16 when SPX was at 1829.08 and VIX was at 28.14 as:

If we see the large jump in the price of the stock beyond the given SDs, we can take the contrarian view to fade the move.


In this post, we explored another way to look for trading opportunities- this time using the expected move!

Stay tuned for more posts from NishaTrades!​