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Monday, July 21, 2014

Iron Condor Equity Curves

Before we look a little deeper at the SPX iron condors (IC), I am going to review the equity curves of both the SPX and RUT ICs. The original posts for these ICs can be found at the links below.

SPX IC:
RUT IC:

In order to compare these trades, I've converted the non-compounded AGR dollar amounts to percentages.  The denominator in these calculations for a strategy is the maximum margin for that strategy.  The max margin numbers are included in the tables below.  For example, in order to get the percentage returns for the SPX 80 days-to-expiration (DTE) 8 Delta strategy variation, the dollar return for each month was divided by $23,350.



The equity curves for the SPX and RUT strategy variations are grouped by DTE.  Each chart below represents a given DTE, and shows the percentage returns for both the RUT and SPX delta variations for that given DTE.  We will start with the 80 DTE strategy first, and the proceed through the DTEs in descending order.







In the next post I will look at some of the details of the SPX ICs.


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

For these margin numbers, how many contracts are you suggesting? And are these based on a single position?

Dave R. said...

Thanks for your question.

All of the IC tests use 10 contracts (10 long puts, 10 short puts, 10 short calls, 10 long calls). If you click on any of 12 links at the top of this post, you will be taken to the original test results posts. These posts describe each test set up including the contract size.

For each IC strategy variation (for example RUT 80 DTE 8 Delta), there were anywhere between 72 and 87 trades initiated from 2007 through April 2014. The maximum margin required for each IC strategy variation during those 72 to 87 trades is the maximum reg-t margin recorded in the tables above.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Dave

Unknown said...

Amazing work. Have you performed any back tests on put CS only or with a percent max loss? Would love to see those results. Thanks for sharing.

Dave R. said...

Rich, thanks for your comment.

On the RUT ICs, I had posts where each wing (put CS & call CS) of the IC was reviewed separately in the form of a P&L heat map. You can find those posts at the links below:

http://dtr-trading.blogspot.com/2014/05/wing-comparison-in-80-day-rut-iron.html
http://dtr-trading.blogspot.com/2014/06/wing-comparison-in-66-day-rut-iron.html
http://dtr-trading.blogspot.com/2014/06/wing-comparison-in-52-day-rut-iron.html
http://dtr-trading.blogspot.com/2014/06/wing-comparison-in-38-day-rut-iron.html
http://dtr-trading.blogspot.com/2014/06/wing-comparison-in-31-day-rut-iron.html
http://dtr-trading.blogspot.com/2014/06/wing-comparison-in-24-day-rut-iron.html

I have run backtests using max loss numbers. A max loss for an option strategy has a similar impact as a stop loss on equity systems...reduced return volatility, but also reduced overall returns...sometimes substantially.

Thanks again,
Dave

Unknown said...

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Unknown said...

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