Investing in a stock generally requires you to pay the share pricemultiplied by the number of shares bought. If you wanted 100 shares of Google (GOOG), now Alphabet Inc., it would cost around a quarter of a million dollars (100 * $2,500 per share) as of February 2022.
However, there is an alternative method that requires less capital:options. This is done by using in-the-moneycall options that mimic the movement of the stock. The deeper an in-the-money the call option is—meaning the closer the delta is to 1—the betterthe option price will track the stock’s movement.
Key Takeaways
- Google (Alphabet, Inc.) has grown to become a household name and one of the most valuable companies in the world by market cap.
- Worth nearly $2 trillion, its shares also trade between $2,000 and $3,000, making it difficult for some individual investors to own a whole share, let alone several of them.
- One way to bet on GOOG or GOOGL shares is to instead use options contracts, which often trade at a fraction of the price of the actual shares.
Google Option Chain
For illustrative purposes,take a look at the option chain of Googletaken from Nasdaq as of Sept. 3, 2014. The option is an American call option.
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An Options Example
If you have a short-term investment horizon, you could probably take a call option expiring on Oct. 18,2014, as shown in the table above. The strike price is the price at which you have the right but not the obligation to buy the stock. The price you pay to have this option is the premium price or the last price. As the strike price decreases, the call option is deeper in-the-money and the premium also increases. The volume, i.e. the number of option contracts traded, affects the bid-ask spread.The higher the volume, the lower the bid-ask spread; the lower the bid-askspread, the moresavings on transaction costs for the investor.
Say you buy the 520 strike Google option at the ask price of $61.20, the breakeven price(BEP)becomes $581.20. On Sept. 3,2014, the stock was trading at around $575. If the stock stays at $575 until Oct. 18, the option price should decline to $55 as the strike price ($520) plus the premium ($55) would then equal the stock price ($575), canceling any arbitrage opportunity.
Since the delta of the option is 1, any change in the stock price should move the option price by the same amount. For example, if the stock price moves to $600 at expiry, the option price would become $80 ($600-$520), for a gain of $18.80, which is $6.20 less than the $25 gain for the stock. The $6.20 representsthe time value of the option, which would decayeventually to zero at expiry.
Opportunity andProtection
Another benefit of investing in Google or any other company using options is the protection an option carries if the stock falls sharply. The fact you don't own the stock,only the option to buy the stock at a certain price, protects you if the stock takes a plunge. This is because you will only lose the premium paid for the option instead of the actual value of the stock.
Say you held100 shares of Google in 2014and they fell sharply from $575 to $100. This represents a loss of $47,500. However, if you owned a call option of 100shares of Google you would haveonly lostthe premium paid. If you paid $61.20 per share for a call option of 100 shares of Google, you would haveonly lost$6,120 instead of$47,500.
Longer-term options are relatively more illiquid than shorter-term options and therefore the transaction costs in the form of a bid-ask spread would be higher. Figure 2 shows the number of trades for call options expiring in June 2016 was less than in the March 2015 expiry, which wasless than the October 2014 expiry. Therefore, it would have becomequite expensive and difficult to invest in a stock using options for the long term. One alternative would beto roll over the options at each expiry, but this would also increase transaction costs in the form of higher brokerage fees.
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For some companies and other securities, there are also mini-options for which the underlying is 10 shares instead of 100. This is useful for smaller investors and for hedging odd lots of a particular stock, i.e. not in multiples of 100. Unfortunately, the volume in these options is not high and mini-options are not as common as regular options.
The Bottom Line
Using options is a cost-effective way to gain exposure to a stock without risking a lot of capital and still beprotected on the downside. One of the main drawbacks is the liquidity of the option contract itself. If you are an investor interested in investing in companies with a high stock price (i.e Amazon (AMZN), Tesla (TSLA) or Google)withouttying up too much capital, options might be the right answer for you.
