主讲人回顾了自己入行交易之前的经历。早年间，大多数人认为投资市场的标准方式就是购买共同基金；只要看好大盘或预期企业价值会增长，买共同基金就是共识。这一投资理念在20世纪70年代和80年代伴随彼得·林奇（Peter Lynch）以及富达麦哲伦基金（Fidelity Magellan Fund）的风靡达到了顶峰。媒体对此进行了大量报道，林奇也撰写了畅销书籍，这种思路便一直延续到了现代。然而，当主讲人真正成为一名衍生品交易员并深入了解期权之后，他的看法发生了根本性转变：“When I became a trader and understood options, then I was thinking, why does anybody buy a mutual fund?”
对于希望通过指数基金参与美股增长的投资者来说，标普500指数（SPX）是最常用的基准标的。市面上规模最大、最受欢迎的三只标普500指数基金包括富达500指数基金（Fidelity 500 Index Fund）、先锋500指数基金（Vanguard 500 Index Fund）以及普信500股票指数基金（T. Rowe Price Equity Index 500 Fund）。这些共同基金与标普500指数（SPX）的相关性几乎恒定为1.0（即100%），偶有微小偏离时也在0.99左右，意味着指数涨跌1个百分点，这些基金的净值也会同向联动1个百分点。
## Notable quotes
> [05:00](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1eoxs6hEKT?t=300s) If I buy SPY, okay, I can sell calls against those shares. I can't do that with a mutual fund. — 主讲人
> [00:00](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1eoxs6hEKT?t=0s) When I became a trader and understood options, then I was thinking, why does anybody buy a mutual fund? — 主讲人
[5:00] 主讲人: If I buy SPY, okay, I can sell calls against those shares. I can't do that with a mutual fund.
[0:00] 主讲人: When I became a trader and understood options, then I was thinking, why does anybody buy a mutual fund?
Original transcript
[0:00] Before I started trading, you know, I knew about mutual funds and I thought that was what everybody used to invest in the market. You know, if you're bullish on the overall market, you think company values are going to grow, go buy a mutual fund. And that was the big, big thing to do in the 70s and 80s, you know, with Peter Lynch and the Magellan Fund and all that. That got all the press and he wrote a book about it. And unfortunately, though, that kind of carried over into what I would call the modern age, because when I became a trader, and understood options, then I was thinking, why Does anybody buy a mutual fund? Okay. So typically, when people want to buy a mutual fund, they think about index funds. They think about the S&P 500 as the overall sort of U.S. equity market, and that's great, and you can do that. and You can certainly participate in the growth of the S&Ps. The SPX is a proxy for that. If it goes up, you can buy a mutual fund that tracks the SPX, the S&P 500, and it'll go up with the market. So for example, there are three, you know, just three of the biggest, most popular mutual funds. I just took a look at them and the correlations between them and the S&P 500. and the SPX, the Fidelity 500 index fund, the Vanguard 500 index funds, the T. Rowe Price Equity Index 500 fund. Those are all very popular mutual funds that track the S&P 500 and their correlations. to the SPX are almost always one or one. Okay, 100% or one. Maybe sometimes they're 99, but usually it's about 1, okay? And that means they move up point for point, 1% for 1%. Down 1%, down 1% with the SPX. Okay, that's what that one correlation means. But here's the deal. Thank you. You can also trade ETFs. Specifically the SPY. And let's stick with the SPY today because that is the State Street S&P 500 index ETF. The symbol SPY. And it is one of the, if not the most actively traded equity products on the board. Okay, so it too has a one point. correlation, perfect correlation with the SPX. So it, the SPY, along with those mutual funds, pretty much tracks the SPX, the S&P 500, one for one. It's trading that index. Okay. So why not just buy those funds? Why would I even bother with that ETF? What is an ETF anyway? Well, an ETF is an exchange-traded fund. Really, it's a stock. Best think of it as a stock. One of the key differences between a mutual fund and an ETF. is that You buy the mutual fund... through the fund company, through, you know, Fidelity or Vanguard or T. Rowe Price. You say, hey, I want to buy $100 of your fund or I want to sell some of that fund. You actually go through the fund family. And what happens is the fund, the manager of the fund, there's a person sitting there and saying, okay, how do we track the S&P 500 with this pile of money? You know, we have to buy the 500 stocks. Thank you. When they see liquidations coming in through the day, people who want to sell the fund versus people who want to buy the fund, money coming in, they balance those out and say, well, how many shares of these 500 stocks do we have to buy? That's why the mutual fund transactions are done at the end of the day. In other words, you don't know what price you're going to get, you don't know what price you're going to buy it at, or sell it at the mutual fund until the end of the day when they come up with their official net asset value. Okay. Now, here's the big difference between those funds and the spy. And I use this, again, the SPY specifically because there are other ETFs that don't work exactly the same way. I don't want to get into that. I just want to talk about the SPY. The spy is a
[5:00] is a stock whose value is determined by a portfolio of the 500 shares. Now you don't Generally, the SPY manager, and there is a manager who makes sure the ETF is functioning properly, paying out the dividends, things like that. - It bought the 500 shares at its inception when the ETF was created. It had some money and it bought those 500 shares. Now, this is an oversimplification, but that's what happened. And then the SPY shares were issued. It became a stock that's traded just like IBM or Apple or Meta or Tesla. It's a stock. and you can buy shares of SPY Through your brokerage firm like Tasty. Okay. And so it's, it's value. goes up and down along with the S&Ps because it represents a portfolio of the S&P 500 stocks. When you buy SPY, you're buying shares. You're buying shares from someone who wants to sell them. It doesn't go through State Street. It doesn't go through a fund family. It doesn't do any of that. You're trading it just like you would SPY. Tesla or IBM. Somebody wants to sell Spy, you want to buy it. Conversely, you want to sell it, there's a buyer for it. So he sold the bid price. The advantage, okay, and here's why I never, ever buy funds. Mutual funds. that if I'm looking to invest in the S&P 500, How does a trader think about it? Well, do I ever buy the spy outright? Usually not. Okay. But... I certainly would prefer buying shares of SPY than I would a mutual fund. Here's why. Okay. If I buy SPY, okay, I can sell calls against those shares. I can't do that with a mutual fund. When I talk about selling calls against stock and reducing the cost basis, it's something that I see if I bought shares of spy, that's certainly what I would do. You know, I'd go out and I'd sell if I bought shares of spy at 77, 77, 70 105 current price. Maybe I'd sell. So get some more strikes here. I'd go out. Um, Maybe I'd sell, I don't know, these 790 calls against it and generate about $595 of credit. and that would reduce the cost basis of my long shares. I cannot do that with a mutual fund. Okay. Can't do it. Mutual funds, they don't have options on them and there's no margin relief. If I had a mutual fund in my account and sold a spy against it, the firm, the clearing firm, would treat that as a naked short call. It doesn't see that long mutual fund as a hedge. But if I buy the SPY shares, I can sell calls against it. The other big advantage is I can buy and sell shares of SPY throughout the trading day. I know exactly the price I'm going to get. If there's some big announcement coming, some news in the economy, whether it's a Fed meeting or something like that, or some big government announcement of data, and I want to exit the trade, I can do that immediately. I don't have to wait to the end of the day. If I see an opportunity in spite and I want to buy at a certain price, I can do that immediately. I don't have to wait to the end of the day. Okay. I can also Just like with a long stock. Okay. I can enter that long spy trade through a short put. Kind of like that wheel strategy where, you know, I sell an out of them instead of buying shares of a stock like IBM or Tesla, I sell it out of the money put instead. And if the stock drops down, I take delivery of the shares. If the stock goes up, I keep the credit. Well, I can do that with SPY too. If, you know, I could sell the 760 puts. for $8.83, taking almost $870 or $880 of credit. Okay. And yes, I'm paying commissions for that. I get that. I get that. But again, that's, you know, a large... amount of credit that I'm taking in. And if SPY goes up, That's my max profit. As SPIRE goes down, I buy the shares for $7.60 minus that $8.80 credit. Mutual funds don't give me that flexibility. I'd have to buy it at whatever the net asset value is at the end of the day. Do not have that flexibility.
[10:00] point is, And this is something that people say, well, you know, gee, Tom, I can, you know, I can put $100 a month in my mutual fund. Right. And yeah, you can put in dollar amounts. You can say, I want to buy a hundred dollars of the fund. I want to buy a thousand dollars of the fund. But here's what you could do instead with the spy. If you just have $100, you say, well, you know, I don't want to take more risk than that. You know, I just want to put $100 a month in. and hope that S&Ps go up, here's what you can do. I can sell that 760 put, but not naked, I'll buy the 759 put against it. Okay, the capital requirement on that is $74, less than $100. And if I'm right, If SPY goes up or I should say is higher than 760, In 37 days, in this example, I keep that $24, $25 profit. Minus commissions. Okay, that's not bad. That's not bad. So and I can do then that if that position expires, frees up the capital. And then maybe I save up enough money in my account that I could potentially buy one share. of Spy. Okay, now one share of SPY is still About $771. Okay, so you can't buy it with $100, but you can sell that put spread. And if you do that every month, well, yeah, I mean, at the end of seven months, you might have enough money to buy a sheriff's buy. Okay, so... Yes, you can put in smaller amounts of money into a mutual fund, and you can't necessarily do that in SPY, but you can sell verticals, put spreads in SPY that take less than $100 to trade. Okay. This trading the spy, or I should say investing in the spy, gives you so much more flexibility than a mutual fund, that funds just don't make sense, particularly to a trader and really to an investor. Buying shares of SPY has the same risk as buying a mutual fund. If the S&Ps drop 20%, you're going to lose 20% in your index fund, you're going to lose 20% in your long spot. If they go up 30%, if they keep going up, up, up, up, up, you're going to make money in the fund, you're going to make money on the SPY. But the big difference is, that There are advantages. that the SPY gives you through the option markets that do not exist in mutual funds. These mutual funds are kind of yesterday's news, in my opinion. Okay. So I'm not even talking about any tax advantages or anything like that, or, you know, management, not even talking about that. That's something that you can talk to a tax professional about. But the point is, and yes, there are fees there. Everybody, you know, their commissions for buying spy. Yes. Okay. And there are fees that the fund charges and the spy charges and the spy is a little bit lower typically than a lot of the fund fees. But that's something that you'll have to evaluate. But in my opinion, the flexibility that the spy gives you in selling is. premium against those SPY shares or selling a put spread or doing a caller, for example, buying the shares, selling it out of the money, the SPY call, buying it out of the money, SPY put. The flexibility it gives you offsets all that stuff. So the bottom line is, If you are thinking about investing in the US market, you think you're bullish on America, bullish on American companies. Great. And if you think about a mutual fund, okay, I get it. But if you're thinking about just an index fund, you know, like an S&P 500 index fund, you owe it to yourself to consider something like the SPY. Through your brokerage firm, you can buy shares, buy one share, buy 100 shares, sell put to get in the trade, sell put spread. And Just take advantage of the flexibility that mutual funds don't give you. Now, this is not a trade recommendation. Whether you buy a fund or even the SPY, how much risk you take, you have to be comfortable with that. And don't take any more risk than you are comfortable with.
