In case you wonder, no I didn’t just pull that one out of my rectum, and yes it’s a real thing. In fact vomma is officially listed as one of the option greeks (check it out over on Investopedia). And it also happens to be one of the more exotic indicators of implied volatility that is very carefully monitored by professional option traders. And let me assure you that they are ALL keeping a very close eye on it this very week. But why?

A subscriber who bought my Options 201 course wrote me today asking for some clarification on how to best stack your weekly butterflies. There were four aspects to his inquiry, namely: 1) which expiration to choose on which days of the week 2) how to distribute your exposure 3) deciding directional bias and 4) structuring ones trade based on the current IV environment. Let’s tackle these questions one by one:

It has been four long months in the making but I am extremely proud to finally announce my long awaited course on trading butterflies. While Options 201 was mainly focused on ‘structure’ and how to create, price, and analyze vertical as well as diagonal spreads, this new course dives deep into the ‘criteria’ of trading butterfly spreads successfully on a weekly basis.

It’s Friday morning before the open and the SPX is pinned right at the edge of the weekly expected move (EM). The ES futures pushed a little bit higher overnight but are now treating water awaiting further instructions. Which makes it a textbook example of the very phenomenon that has driven equity markets to the edges of the weekly EM since the introduction of weekly options by the CBOE in 2016. But what exactly is causing this phenomenon, or market behavior in the first place?