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by dan-robertson 1645 days ago
Because you would expect to lose money on it? That is, you should expect that in the long run the insurance would cost a little more than the amount it pays out and it sounds like you’d want insurance against losing money in a crash so buying insurance is just losing that money early.

Obviously that’s only true in the long term. There were some times when buying insurance may have been a good idea (eg early 2020) but that’s easier to say in hindsight. If you’re managing savings for a pension then this kind of thing could make sense as you get old because you mightn’t live long enough for the costs to average out. But the normal way to deal with that is adjusting the balance between equities and bonds.

1 comments

The Black Swan ETF already does it

It's 90% of treasure bonds and some small percent of options

On a bulish market, you loose some performance (insurance costs) for renewing the options

On a bearish market (crash) your bonds loose market value, but the options will go up N amount of times. which will give you overall positive performance.

If the market stagnates, you'll loose money as the options continue to be renewed while the bonds are stable.

And you don't need to allocate all your portfolio to this ETF, can simply combine it with everything else you have. ----

Anyway

I've done this before, I believed the market could become wild

I bought VIX options and got lucky with a 20x score

Obviously this is not that easy or accessible to retail investors (and it's gonna cost at least 100$ monthly)

But if one's to believe we're near the peak, and the crash could be coming any time soon (next couple of months), buying this kind of insurance would make sense (I think about it as Insurance as a Service, because I just want a simple monthly subscription for the work behind the scenes)

Wow Vix options trades… that’s pretty bold that’s a super complex instrument with some odd rules.
i got the tip from zerohedge lol

in the end it's just another market traded instrument, and you can sell it before expiration for a possibly better price