Fine Tune your Options Trading with Weekly Expirations
The introduction of widely available weekly expiration option contracts provides investors with flexibility to the timing of option contracts. Weekly options are designed to give traders more flexible exposure to market events such as releases of economic data and earnings announcements. The advent of weekly options has also provided investors with significantly more strike prices to choose from. This has allowed investors to trade strategies with very precise risk and reward metrics and timing based on their risk tolerance and market outlook.
The primary difference between weekly options and monthly options are that the weekly options have expirations every Friday while the monthly options only expire on the third Friday of the month. Weekly options have the same risks associated with the exercise or assignment of shares as monthly options, but due to the higher frequency of expiration dates, will have these risks occur more frequently.
Weekly options are the same as monthly options in most aspects, but due to their shorter expiration dates weekly options tend to have:
Smaller premiums: shorter dated options that expire on the first or second Friday of the month will have less premium than the monthly options expiring on the third Friday. This provides a lower cost for option buyers and a lower credit received for option sellers.
Accelerated time decay: while an option's value does erode with time, the rate of the decay in the options price happens at a faster rate closer to expiration.
Higher gamma exposure: gamma refers to the rate of change in respect to an options delta. With less time to expiry, the delta fluctuations of an option become more volatile to changes in the price of the underlying. This means that a small move in the underlying will have a larger impact on the pricing of the option contract.
In summary, weekly options and monthly options are very similar. They have similar characteristics, but weekly options are prone to more volatility and accelerated time decay. While this provides opportunities to trade more frequently, shorter dated options typically require a more active trade management.
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