Leverage (Part 1)

When I think about the largest catastrophes ever attributable to options (arguably LTCM and the 2008 financial crisis, which involved an alphabet soup of derivatives), one word that sums up the root cause is “leverage.”

Leverage is important—not only when it comes to television but most assuredly when it comes to options. Investopedia defines leverage as: “the use of various financial instruments or borrowed capital, such as margin, to increase the potential return of an investment.” It goes on:

     > For example, say you have $1,000 to invest.
     > This amount could be invested in 10 shares of
     > Microsoft (MSFT) stock, but to increase leverage,
     > you could invest the $1,000 in five options
     > contracts. You would then control 500 shares
     > instead of just 10.

A cash account that does not allow trading on margin employs no leverage. The only way to “blow up,” or lose everything, is to invest the entire account and see the underlying assets (for long positions) go to zero. It’s very rare that stock prices go to zero (e.g. corporate bankruptcy). No broad-based (U.S.) index has ever gone to zero.

While leverage is exciting because upside exceeds 1:1, the same may occur on the downside resulting in a greater risk of blowing up. A leveraged account can go to zero long before the underlying assets do.

I have previously done research aiming to compare performance between long shares and naked puts (NP) while keeping leverage constant. This discussion can be seen here and here. I added $5M of risk each day and when I removed risk in one group, I removed the same amount of risk in the other.

The graphs shown here and here are particularly powerful. They show the NP strategy to generate a lower gross return and a much lower drawdown (DD).

While increasing leverage is effectively an increase in position size, position size can be too large without employing any leverage. Long shares purchased in cash accounts are not utilizing margin but the account can still blow up. In retrospect, the position size can always be said to have been too large. The minimum capital to trade a strategy is at least the maximum DD ever seen and the longer a backtest, the more likely the backtested max DD is to meet or exceed future market pullbacks. This certainly is not guaranteed and given a long enough trading horizon is not even likely.

I will continue next time.