Currency Shares Yen (FXY) - Dollar: Bet On Yen Closes; Euro Bet Opens

FXY is trading 109.02. The LIVEVOL™ Pro Summary is below.



The company has traded over 24,186 options today in the first two hours on total daily average option volume of just 2,370. The largest trade has been 8000 Mar 100 puts (bot) / Mar 105 puts (sold) / Mar 110 calls (bot). This trade has accounted for 24,000 of the contracts today. The Company Tab and Day's biggest trades snapshots are included (click either image to enlarge).





The Options Tab snapshot more clearly shows the trades - note the relatively large open interest on the lines that traded.



This is closing on at least some of those lines. As I 've shown before, multi-leg trades can more easy to understand if they are broken into pieces. This trade can be seen as:

(1) Buy March 110 Calls for 1.15
(2) Sell the March 105/100 put spread @ 0.25
Total position cost = 8000 * 100 * ($0.90) = $720,000.

So buy upside calls and fund it with a sale of a put spread. Clearly a bullish trade (or the closing of a bearish trade in this case). If FXY goes up, the dollar goes down relative to the Yen. Someone is paying $720,000 to close a bullish position in the dollar after this recent run up relative to the Euro. The PnL chart on March expo. is included (click to enlarge).



As an opening order, max loss is $4.7 million and this breaks even when FXY hits $110.90.

The skew chart for FXY is included (click to enlarge).


Currency skew is usually just a parabola - unlike equity option skew. In this case you can see an upward tilt - pushing the probability priced into the options up that FXY goes up (or dollar goes down relative to the Yen).

Interestingly the skew in the dollar vs the Euro has been showing the opposite recently. You can read that blog HERE

The Charts Tab snapshot (6 months) is included below (click to enlarge). The bottom portion is the vol chart: IV30™ v. HV20™. Note also the spike in FXY at the end of last year to the 115 range.



This could be seen as a de-coupling of dollar to Euro - with dollar stronger. Then a bet against the dollar relative to the Yen. Having said that, I don't want to "make up" too many "possibilities." Let the Euro and Yen trades stand for themselves.

This is trade analysis, not a recommendation.

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