IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jfinte/v4y2025i2p25-d1678608.html

Option Strategies and Market Signals: Do They Add Value to Equity Portfolios?

Author

Listed:
  • Sylvestre Blanc

    (Grammont Finance, Derivatives and Portfolio Management, 1095 Lutry, Switzerland)

  • Emmanuel Fragnière

    (HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Business School, ITO, 3960 Sierre, Switzerland)

  • Francesc Naya

    (HES-SO School of Management Fribourg, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland)

  • Nils S. Tuchschmid

    (HES-SO School of Management Fribourg, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland)

Abstract

This study explores an innovative approach to incorporating option strategies into equity portfolios. It presents an alternative direction that institutional investors could take to overcome their current challenges, in a context where traditionally diversified portfolios of only equity and fixed-income assets have shown weaknesses that make it difficult for these investors to achieve their performance goals within their risk limits. We test whether a set of well-known backward-looking signals from equities markets and less-researched forward-looking ones from options markets can be used to improve the efficiency of two option strategies, namely covered call and protective put. The trend signal appears to be the one that adds the most value to both strategies. This study also shows that increasing complexity through additional trading rules does not improve the results of the more basic option strategies that make use of the signals.

Suggested Citation

  • Sylvestre Blanc & Emmanuel Fragnière & Francesc Naya & Nils S. Tuchschmid, 2025. "Option Strategies and Market Signals: Do They Add Value to Equity Portfolios?," FinTech, MDPI, vol. 4(2), pages 1-15, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jfinte:v:4:y:2025:i:2:p:25-:d:1678608
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2674-1032/4/2/25/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2674-1032/4/2/25/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Annaert, Jan & Osselaer, Sofieke Van & Verstraete, Bert, 2009. "Performance evaluation of portfolio insurance strategies using stochastic dominance criteria," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 272-280, February.
    2. Guido Baltussen & Bart van der Grient & Wilma de Groot & Erik Hennink & Weili Zhou, 2012. "Exploiting Option Information in the Equity Market," Financial Analysts Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 68(4), pages 56-72, July.
    3. Frazzini, Andrea & Pedersen, Lasse Heje, 2014. "Betting against beta," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 111(1), pages 1-25.
    4. François-Serge Lhabitant, 1998. "Enhancing Portfolio Performance Using Option Strategies: Why Beating the Market is Easy," FAME Research Paper Series rp1, International Center for Financial Asset Management and Engineering.
    5. Moskowitz, Tobias J. & Ooi, Yao Hua & Pedersen, Lasse Heje, 2012. "Time series momentum," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(2), pages 228-250.
    6. Jegadeesh, Narasimhan & Titman, Sheridan, 1993. "Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(1), pages 65-91, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cakici, Nusret & Zaremba, Adam, 2022. "Salience theory and the cross-section of stock returns: International and further evidence," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(2), pages 689-725.
    2. Cederburg, Scott & O’Doherty, Michael S. & Wang, Feifei & Yan, Xuemin (Sterling), 2020. "On the performance of volatility-managed portfolios," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(1), pages 95-117.
    3. Adam Zaremba & Jacob Koby Shemer, 2018. "Price-Based Investment Strategies," Springer Books, Springer, number 978-3-319-91530-2, March.
    4. Miffre, Joëlle, 2016. "Long-short commodity investing: A review of the literature," Journal of Commodity Markets, Elsevier, vol. 1(1), pages 3-13.
    5. Flögel, Volker & Schlag, Christian & Zunft, Claudia, 2022. "Momentum-Managed Equity Factors," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    6. Victoria Dobrynskaya, 2017. "Dynamic Momentum and Contrarian Trading," HSE Working papers WP BRP 61/FE/2017, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    7. Andreas Neuhierl & Michael Weber & Michael Weber, 2017. "Monetary Momentum," CESifo Working Paper Series 6648, CESifo.
    8. Sina Ehsani & Juhani T. Linnainmaa, 2019. "Factor Momentum and the Momentum Factor," NBER Working Papers 25551, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Zaremba, Adam & Szyszka, Adam & Karathanasopoulos, Andreas & Mikutowski, Mateusz, 2021. "Herding for profits: Market breadth and the cross-section of global equity returns," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 348-364.
    10. Lou, Dong & Polk, Christopher & Skouras, Spyros, 2019. "A tug of war: Overnight versus intraday expected returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(1), pages 192-213.
    11. Baltussen, Guido & Swinkels, Laurens & Van Vliet, Pim, 2021. "Global factor premiums," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(3), pages 1128-1154.
    12. Chiah, Mardy & Long, Huaigang & Zaremba, Adam & Umar, Zaghum, 2023. "Trade competitiveness and the aggregate returns in global stock markets," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    13. Gao, Yang & Leung, Henry & Satchell, Stephen, 2022. "Partial moment momentum," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    14. Minyou Fan & Youwei Li & Ming Liao & Jiadong Liu, 2022. "A reexamination of factor momentum: How strong is it?," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 57(3), pages 585-615, August.
    15. Flögel, Volker & Schlag, Christian & Zunft, Claudia, 2021. "Momentum-managed equity factors," SAFE Working Paper Series 317, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    16. Kerstin Lamert & Benjamin R. Auer & Ralf Wunderlich, 2025. "Discretization of continuous-time arbitrage strategies in financial markets with fractional Brownian motion," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 101(2), pages 163-218, April.
    17. Blanco, Ivan & De Jesus, Miguel & Remesal, Alvaro, 2023. "Overlapping momentum portfolios," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 1-22.
    18. Adam Zaremba, 2019. "The Cross Section of Country Equity Returns: A Review of Empirical Literature," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 12(4), pages 1-26, October.
    19. Dobrynskaya, Victoria, 2019. "Avoiding momentum crashes: Dynamic momentum and contrarian trading," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    20. David Hirshleife, 2015. "Behavioral Finance," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 7(1), pages 133-159, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jfinte:v:4:y:2025:i:2:p:25-:d:1678608. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.