Introduction to Commodity Option Selling

The premise of commodity option selling is to collect premium through the sale of options on futures in hopes that the time erosion and volatility decay of a particular short option will overcome any increase in option value due to adverse price movement in the underlying futures market. An option selling strategy offers unlimited risk and limited reward, which is opposite of what many might consider rational. Nonetheless, the odds of success on any given short option trade are arguably in favor of the seller over the buyer.

The concept of an option is nearly identical to that of an insurance policy. The buyer purchased the instrument to receive a payout should a substantial event occur. The seller of the instrument, is collecting a payment in hopes of the “policy” expiring worthless. Accordingly, the practice of commodity option selling is similar to the business of selling insurance policies.

Most of the time, premium is collected by the insurance company and kept as a profit, but there will be times in which unexpected circumstances arise and trigger "claims" against the policy, or in the case of option trading a large drawdown at the hands of an increasing option value. In other words, like that of insurance policies, the odds of success on each individual option selling venture is high, but the challenge is to keep the magnitude of the losing option selling positions to a level in which it is possible to be profitable in the long run.