The idea worth investigating
FPM historical 19-cohort exit comparison, June 2012 to September 2026. The reproduced original ladder had two paying cohorts; the 3x exit had four. These are simulated results using modeled bid/ask execution, a fixed initial-capital premium budget and 50% reinvestment of monetized proceeds. Both original payouts occurred in March 2020: two positions in one crisis, not two independent crisis tests.
Scope: a completed house exit-policy comparison on a reconstructed conditional VIX-call strategy, with substantial event concentration and retrospective rule selection.
An option bought as insurance finally trades at several times its purchase price. Selling feels disciplined. Waiting risks giving the gain back. The difficult question is whether the event you bought protection for has finished.
Macro Ops' Conditional 50 Cent Tail Hedge provided the starting point for our historical VIX-call work. We extended the question to profit-taking: keep the entries fixed, then compare early exits with a staged exit that waits for a much larger move. This is our experiment, not a return series supplied by Macro Ops. Source strategy collection
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See what changes the investment case.
The headline is the starting point. The subscriber analysis takes you through:
- How the exit rules changed total option profit and the depth of the equity drawdown.
- Why the early-March sales left less protection for the rest of the drawdown.
- How partial sales changed the compromise on the same entry cohorts.
AI assists curation and drafting. The research status distinguishes paper reviews from house tests. Read our research approach.