To The Moon

‘You Only Live Once’ became the rallying cry of retail traders in certain Reddit forums making high-risk bets in stock markets.

Now, it might also be the inspiration for a growing group of professional investors who appear to be taking a page out of retail’s playbook with a controversial options strategy.

That’s according to Nomura Securities International Inc. Strategist Charlie McElligott, who’s blaming a proliferation of professionals piling into options right before their expiry for exacerbating recent swings in markets.

The strategy of trading options close to their expiry has become a popular strategy on forums such as WallStreetBets, with one person on the social media platform recently claiming to have lost a $100,000 inheritance after tradingone-day puts on the S&P 500.

“YOLOing into 0 and 1 Days-Til-Expiration (DTE) options has now been ‘institutionalized’ by vol traders at many of the largest funds on the Street,” McElligott wrote in a note to clients. “It’s not about retail-alone playing this game anymore.”

“We have seen witnessed some absolutely biblical usage of 0DTE and 1DTE options, and it’s acting like jet fuel being dumped on the already out of control ‘macro’ fire occurring into persistent ‘negative gamma’ momentum overshoot flows,” he added. “Using the certainty of dealer hedging flows that their orders create to then amplify and ‘juice’ the intended directional market move … before closing-out positions mere hours later by end of day.”

He estimates that 0-1DTE options are making up a growing portion of the total options written on the S&P 500. Some days in September saw such options make up as much as 65% of the total.

Source: Nomura

Buying these one- or zero-days to expiration options can expose investors to big profits and losses as they’re typically more vulnerable to changes in the price of the underlying stock or index. That means the contracts can fluctuate wildly in value, even if they’re only held for a day or two.

The “institutionalization” of these contracts is also making markets more vulnerable to big swings over all, according to McElligott. The amount of sensitivity in the options market to underlying stocks, indexes and exchange-traded fund — known asdeltain trader parlance — is now on a par with the depths of the Covid-19 crash in March 2020 and the so-called ‘Volmageddon’ of early 2018, he says.

Source: Nomura

“Most critically as it relates to the outrageous ranges and swings this past week in US equities and into the upcoming expiration, it is the staggering amount of (negative) front-delta into Friday’s [options expiry] that has then needed to be traded on the approach, which is then acting as further shadow-convexity in the market,” he says.