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Solvency Cone

Categories: Accounting, Credit

A “solvency cone” is a cone of shame that humans have to wear when they’ve overextended themselves financially.

Eh, okay. A real-life “solvency cone” is a mathematical model that takes transaction fees into account when determining how profitable an investment portfolio is likely to be.

To completely oversimplify, let’s say we think we can make a profit of $50 if we execute a series of eight trades. Sounds good, right? Except we pay $5 per trade, which means we’re really only making a profit of $10 overall. Less good. All we had to do was some simple math to see that our trade scheme isn’t as much of a money-maker as we thought it was.

What if we were to take our oversimplified example, multiply it by a whole bunch of accounts, trade amounts, trade fees, etc., and use calculations that are about a zillion times more complex? That’s what solvency cones do. They give investors realistic models of investment returns, based not on what all the fund managers and big-time institutional investors are doing, but on real trades that come with real transaction fees.

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Finance: What is Alligator Spread?28 Views

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finance a la shmoop what is an alligator spread.... no it's not that

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an alligator eats the spread from profitable trades to just a break-even [Alligator eats spread]

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trade or worse the alligator is essentially the brokers commission or

00:20

spread however it gets paid which makes a given trade unprofitable like a trader

00:25

bought a stock for $118.23 cents a share thinking she'd sell it the next day for

00:30

$120 even and make a quick buck 77 but then the Commission comes in at a buck

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80 making that particular trade unprofitable well in the real world that [Spread or gross gain from trade pie chart]

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term applies to the options market place where Commission's or spreads can be

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massive as a percentage of the entity being traded that is a bid-ask spread on

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a volatile tech stock might be for a stock trading at 40 bucks a share today

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for about ten weeks of duration a put on it at $35 might be priced as a massive

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$2 a share meaning that in order to make money buying a put option the stock [Put option stock graph]

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would have to decline by more than seven dollars in the next ten weeks that is if

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an investor wanted to buy the put they'd be charged two bucks and if they wanted [Person takes away 2 bucks]

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to sell the put all they could get for it would be like a dollar 20... 80 cent

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spread there if you were trading on the puts and the calls got that then think

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about the put itself well in order to make money buying a put option the stock

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would have to decline by more than seven dollars in the next ten weeks so yeah it [Decline over more than 7 dollars shown on graph]

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gets pretty brutal, careful for those options so let's say a few weeks go

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along and the price of the put that they paid two dollars for now they want to

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sell it because the stocks gone down in the right direction well at dollar 20

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now all that gets a dollar eighty the spread ate them up like alligator ate em [Alligator lurking]

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gobbled up all the profits so yeah when you combine multiple sets of options

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like the above one you can imagine the alligator ends up being painted as well

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very toothy [Man painting and crocodile appears scaring him away]

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)