February 8th Options Now Available For iShares Trust - iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM)

Investors in iShares Trust - iShares Russell 2000 ETF (Symbol: IWM) saw new options begin trading today, for the February 8th expiration. At Stock Options Channel, our YieldBoost formula has looked up and down the IWM options chain for the new February 8th contracts and identified one put and one call contract of particular interest.

The put contract at the $183.00 strike price has a current bid of $2.82. If an investor was to sell-to-open that put contract, they are committing to purchase the stock at $183.00, but will also collect the premium, putting the cost basis of the shares at $180.18 (before broker commissions). To an investor already interested in purchasing shares of IWM, that could represent an attractive alternative to paying $184.39/share today.

Because the $183.00 strike represents an approximate 1% discount to the current trading price of the stock (in other words it is out-of-the-money by that percentage), there is also the possibility that the put contract would expire worthless. The current analytical data (including greeks and implied greeks) suggest the current odds of that happening are 99%. Stock Options Channel will track those odds over time to see how they change, publishing a chart of those numbers on our website under the contract detail page for this contract. Should the contract expire worthless, the premium would represent a 1.54% return on the cash commitment, or 40.18% annualized at Stock Options Channel we call this the YieldBoost.