I am curious for myself. The market opened about 1.75% down, quickly went to down 2.5% before 9am, and rallied all the way to closing just down 0.15% on the day, so a rally of ~1.5% from open to close. Could I have made significant money with $NDXP options today? My gut tells me no, but I want to see.

Specifically the most likely trade I would have done is buy $NDXP call options at the open for $NDX to close flat by the end of the day. Those obviously would have expired worthless as NDX did not end the day positive. But how about some others? The VIX is currently at 21, and my gut feel is it is too high to make money buying out of the money calls, but let’s see.

First, what if I had bought at the open with a strike 0.5% down from yesterday. NDX closed Friday at 19,280. 0.5% down is 19,180. NDX opened today at 18,990. The first trade for .NDXP-25-03-31-C-19,180 was at $19. So, you would have made $100 / $19 = about 5x your money. Damn. That is a lot.

OK, so how about if you bought .NDXP-25-03-31-C-19,200 at 8:48am when the market was down the full 2.5%. You could have picked it up for $9. It would have ended at $80. Almost 10X. Damn.

What about an ATM call? You could have bought .NDXP-25-03-31-C-19,000 at 8:30am for $100, and at 8:45am for $40. That would have closed at $280. Meaning 3X or 8X your money.

Damn, Well, I guess you could have made money today.