Collar Option Strategy

A collar is an options strategy that combines three positions. The options trader can establish a collar strategy by buying shares of a stock then buying a put option and selling (writing) a call option on that stock. The trader should purchase one put and write one call for every 100 shares held in the underlying stock. The collar strategy also needs that the purchased put and the written call expire on the same day and are both out-of-money.

The Options Collar strategy is mainly used by traders, whose opinion regarding the market is neutral, and who have already some unrealized profits and want to reduce their downside risk. Using this strategy limits the downside risk, but also the upside potential.

This item downloads collar option combinations, for U.S. options, that are found by the Collar Screener available at avasaram.com.

The data can be downloaded on a daily-basis. The downloader inserts the data into a custom database options_collar.

This Collar Option database contains 18 fields:

Date: The date the combinations were found

Stock_Price: The underlying stock current price

Spread: The option collar spread (put call spread)

Ret: The option collar maximum return

Option_Long: The name of long put option

Type_Long: The type of the long option (put)

Strike_Long: The strike price of the long put option

Expiry_Long: The expiration date of the long put option

Ask_Long: The ask price of the long put option

Volume_Long: The volume of long put option

OpenInterest_Long: The open interest of the long put option

Option_Short: The name of the short call option

Type_Short: The type of the short option (call)

Strike_Short: The strike price of the short call option

Expiry_Short: The expiration date of the short call option

Bid_Short: The bid price of the short call option

Volume_Short: The volume of the short call option

OpenInterest_Short: The open interest of the short call option

For a particular date, one optionable stock can have several collar option combinations.

The put options are stored in the Long columns and the call options are stored in the Short column.

The strike price of the options is saved in the Strike_Long and Strike_Short columns, although they can be easily extracted from the option names.