Days like today happen every so often especially when we’re about 12-17 days from expiry, all of your time decay based strategies suddenly increase in value. I notice that most of the ‘time decay’ you get closer to expiry happens in spurts and does not occur consistently day to day. Days like this are sometimes called a high value day amongst theta based traders. Every month I find myself pointing it out to my wife and showing her the increases in P/L across he board on one single day. I try to explain it as market makers having to start getting rid of the time value in the options once we start approaching expiration day. I gather its when they think its more of a ‘risk on’ environment than risk off. Perhaps this means that the next week or so will be positive or at least less volatile? This happened with my MICs and now today I saw it happening with my M3 and BB trades. I’d be chugging along at a pretty static P/L and then in one day, all of a sudden, it’s worth a lot more. Anyways, interesting.
All of the Oct trades are up a good amount of money and its probably time to start winding them down and getting in Nov and Dec M3s.