Travelers Companies, Inc. (TRV), Trending Stock Report

This morning another insurance company showed up on our list of compressed stocks. Travelers Companies, Inc. (TRV) has a long history of profitable straddle trades (our favorite neutral strategy) after a compression signal.

Going back as far as 1995, anytime you were able to buy a straddle with a volatility expectation of 19.29% (see page 3), with a life of at least 20 trading days, there was an opportunity to make money.

It is very interesting that TRV has an advantage that the winning option of the straddle tends to hit the maximum value near the expiration date. There were numerous compression signals going back to 1995 that also worked well. So many that we don’t have enough space to show you all of them. Let’s just say that TRV straddles after a compression signal have been very reliable in the past.

This Volatility Term Structure for TRV shows us the implied volatility of options for the at-the-money options for each expiration. To learn more about Volatility Term Structure, click here. Again, this term structure is quite flat. The highest point in the graph is for the August monthly expiration. That high value is 23.36%. The lowest value is for the September expiration. This is the expiration we are interested in. Its value is only 19.29%. All other expirations have values between 23.36 and 19.29.

This MDM graph compares the modeled expectations of current options prices (the orange line) to the actual movement of TRV’s stock price over the past 4 years. You can see that the actual behavior (the blue histogram) shows us that TRV made big moves more frequently than modeled options prices currently expect. That tells us that TRV options are less expensive than they should be relative to the stock’s actual behavior. That means we can buy options cheaply for the September monthly expiration.

This Volatility Cone shows us the implied volatility of options each term compared to the average historical volatility (the blue line) of TRV options at each term. To learn more about the Volatility Cone, click here. It also shows the high and the low historical volatility for each term. This graph confirms that volatility expectations at each term are below the 4-year historical average.

TRV’s stock price is compressed with a reliable history of making bigger-than-expected moves after a compression signal. Volatility expectations are low relative to past stock behavior. This is an option buying opportunity.

To get the specific details and prices on today’s trade ideas, be sure to read today’s ODDS Online Daily Option Trade Idea.