A Starting Map of Quantitative Options Strategies

Summary

The document offers a beginner’s survey of option strategies that could serve as starting points for quantitative trading. It groups familiar payoff structures—covered positions, directional spreads, straddles, strangles, butterflies, and iron condors—alongside calendar strategies and more advanced dispersion trading, which is framed as correlation trading. It also points readers toward further reading in research repositories.

The evidence is a set of suggestions from forum respondents, not a tested strategy, implementation guide, or performance comparison. The recommendations assume prior understanding of calls, puts, option Greeks, and volatility, and the document gives no entry rules, pricing models, risk controls, or backtest results. Readers would need to study each structure’s payoff, volatility exposure, and execution constraints before coding or trading it.

Key ideas

• Basic option strategies include covered positions, vertical spreads, straddles, strangles, butterflies, and iron condors.
• Calendar strategies and dispersion trading are also suggested, with dispersion described as correlation trading.
• The suggestions are a learning roadmap rather than defined, tested trading systems.
• Understanding option payoffs, Greeks, and volatility is presented as useful groundwork.

Tags

# What are some beginner quantitative option trading strategies?


# What are some beginner quantitative option trading strategies?












I'm new to quantitative trading, with good knowledge in finance and coding (mainly Python, Java, R, etc).

I would like to know if there are any basic quantitative option trading strategies that can be coded in Python.

I have a basic understanding of statistics, L.Algebra and Machine learning. Are there any basic options trading strategies that can get me started in quant trading.

Thanks!

## Answer by radvan (score 4)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/45282

There are lot of strategies. You can try for example:

- Active Collar strategy

- Calendar Option Strategies

- Dispersion trading

Try to google more, or look for strategies on ssrn.com or arxiv.org ...

## Answer by vibhu_singh (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/47462

If you have a good understanding of call option, put option, options greeks and volatility, then you can try some of these strategies:

- Covered call/put

- Bull/ Bear spread

- Strangle

- Straddle

- Butterfly spread

- Iron condor

Intermediate

- Calendar Spread

Advanced

- Dispersion trading (Correlation trading)

Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.