This is a weekly column focusing on ETF options by Scott Nations, a proprietary trader and financial engineer with about 20 years of experience in options.
Crude oil has gotten crushed over the past year. While many other ETFs have moved sideways, the United States Oil ETF (USO | B-100), has fallen more than 60 percent, as you can see:
USO seeks to track the price of crude oil futures and does so by owning the front-month (the next delivery month to expire) crude oil futures contracts. It then rolls those positions to the next delivery month as the front-month futures contract nears expiration.
USO uses futures exclusively in its structure, and is different than the vast majority of ETFs that use the open-end or unit investment trust structure. The ETF is structured as a partnership, and as such, does tax reporting to shareholders via a K-1. This complicates tax filing for some investors.
But USO is the best way to get exposure to crude oil futures prices without a futures account. Unfortunately, this best way isn’t a very good way, because the constant rolling of futures from the front month to the second month generates substantial costs for the fund, some hidden in phenomenon like the bid/ask spread for the futures contracts.
USO A Short-Term Tool
Because of these costs, USO is best used as a short-term trading vehicle. One institutional options trader is taking that one step further and using USO options as a very-short-term trading vehicle to get bearish exposure to crude oil prices while defining his risk. He believes USO will be below $12.85 at the close on Friday, Aug. 28.
Our trader got this bearish exposure by buying 17,500 shares of the USO $13 strike put options expiring at the close on Aug. 28. He paid $0.15 per share, and since each option corresponds to 100 shares of USO, he paid a total of $262,500 for the right to sell 1.75 million shares of USO at the $13.00 strike price.
As with any option-buying strategy, the maximum loss is the premium paid, $0.15 per share in this case. His breakeven point is $12.85; at that point, at expiration, the options will be worth the $0.15 paid. But as USO continues to drop below $12.85, the profit continues to increase, as you can see:
