Curious what have you found to be the benefit of such long-dated puts, and have you found them to move enough to make the gains worth locking up the not-insignificant money tied up in them for several months?
Here's how I'm thinking about these:
For movement - the ones I buy cost me around $25-30 so far, and they move $5 worth up and down with frequency. $5 move on $30 is a 16% gain. Those $5 option price moves happen frequently - today's $10 move in the share price will have been close to a $5 move in the option price as a for instance.
So far I've cycled in and out of these puts in less than a month each time, but I just started. Meanwhile I've cycled in and out of long calls in days, weeks, months, and even years. I expect that this will be my experience with the puts I've started buying - that some of these positions will turn over in days or weeks, but the positions are designed to win in months or even years. These have consistently worked well for me.
My larger mental model is its a position that I want to have for at most a year; the second year gives me an extra 6 months to be right (and ready to close for a profit next week).
Oh - and when I try to shorten the time scale on purchased options, I lose. Nearly 100% - I'm bad at it. I think its because I have on my long term buy and hold or "I will be right eventually" hat on, and those are both bad ways to think about 1 week or 1 month options. And I get enough leverage with the long options, that I don't need to try to shorten the expiration.
And you're right that it's a significant amount of money tied up. 10 of these were about $30k. For my portfolio and situation, having this money committed this way for a year or more is fine (good?). I don't need to lever or cycle it more often to get good value.
Also I'm not looking for only a $5 gain - I've got these 150s because I think that they might be worth $50 intrinsic at some point this year. Though I'll probably bail on them earlier than that, and only get $10 worth.
For my decision making, I really like the risk/reward in this position (considering everything, including have the money tied up) - so I'm in.
Something of a side note. This is why I don't include position sizes when I post about trades I'm making and why. It might be that this particular position is a good one for a single contract for some people, but is a bad position for 100 of them ($300k). Meanwhile 100 of these might be perfectly reasonable for others.
I feel like position size comparison can get people into trouble too easily by choosing a bad sizing for themselves, and without that risk providing important additional information about the value of the position. If a position change of your own that you post about is a good position for me, in my portfolio, and my objectives, then its a good position for me regardless of how big your position size is in the position that you posted about.
I got the idea of the position out of the posting and that's what is helpful.
