Horizontal Spread

  

Categories: Banking, Trading

Derivatives are financial instruments based on underlying assets, like stocks, bonds, or commodities. Options represent the most famous variety.

With an option, you can acquire the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a certain asset at a certain price at a certain point in the future. So you can acquire an option to buy 100 shares of MSFT stock at $130 (the $130 represents the "strike price" for the option), expiring two months from now.

A horizontal spread is a combination of derivatives that looks to take advantage of volatility over time. To utilize the strategy, an investor will take both a long and a short position on the same underlying asset.

The structure means the investor has both a bet that the asset will go up in price...and a bet that the price will go down. The strike price for the bets will be the same. However, the expiration dates will be different. One of the bets (either the long or the short) will have a short-term expiration. The other bet will have a longer-term expiration.

When you look at a stock chart (or the chart of any asset, for that matter), prices move up or down, meaning they are tracked on the vertical axis. Meanwhile, time keeps moving forward, tracked on the horizontal axis. Hence the name for this strategy: a horizontal spread. The investor has two positions, separated by time...or, looking at it graphically, separated horizontally on a standard price chart.

Horizontal spreads are looking to take advantage of the timing of some short-term event. An FDA ruling, an earnings release, an economic report, etc. For that reason, the strategy is also known as a calendar spread, or a time spread.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is The Difference Between ...6 Views

00:00

Finance allah shmoop What is the difference between a horizontal

00:06

merger and a vertical merger Okay Mergers let's talk rock

00:12

As in a feller he was kind of the king

00:15

of mergers both vertical and horizontal Let's Talk about what

00:18

comprises each of these things All right in the energy

00:21

industry specifically oil Ah horizontal monopoly would exist if a

00:25

company owned all the oil wells in the world And

00:29

in fact for a short time opec owned well it

00:32

was very close to a monopoly at least an enormous

00:34

percentage of all the oil wells in the world such

00:37

that they were able to constrain supply create panic and

00:40

increase prices dramatically some five hundred percent and change the

00:45

world during the nineteen seventies when we had a very

00:47

weak president going against them and here's what inflation adjusted

00:51

prices for a barrel of oil looked like in that

00:53

period So that's a horizontal monopoly like where you own

00:58

all the sources of oil coming out of the ground

01:01

horizontal So what's a vertical monopoly Well in the process

01:05

of processing oil a lot has to happen for the

01:08

system to work right first step you have to pull

01:11

All the oil out of the ground right the oil

01:13

well but then you have to process it or synthesize

01:16

it from dinosaur coop into well something that's actually usable

01:20

in your lexus with the turbo engine Then because the

01:24

world demand is continuous you have to store the oil

01:27

and then distributed continuously forever and ever and ever and

01:31

eventually the retail customer buyer has to be ableto pull

01:34

up into a gas station think real estate here and

01:37

fill her up So if you owned a vertical monopoly

01:40

while you would own the discovery and mining of oil

01:44

the synthesis or processing of it or refining of it

01:48

as it's called in the industry you don't a storage

01:50

company a trucking and distribution company and while then a

01:54

bunch of gas stations well that would be a fully

01:56

integrated vertical monopoly So when horizontal and vertical mergers get

02:02

discussed they get framed under this format So let's say

02:05

we're coric coffee machines and we want a vertical merger

02:09

in our business because we're sick and tired of paying

02:11

coffee growers twelve cents a cup for something well that

02:15

cost them less than a penny So we at keurig

02:17

Decide to buy our own coffee plantation roasting and grinding

02:22

and processing company so that we can supply our own

02:25

coffee in our own little cups Well that would be

02:29

a vertical merger in the coffee business And it often

02:32

makes a lot of sense because all that profit that's

02:34

been given out to coffee vendors selling to the kindly

02:37

loving caffeinated folks at koi rig with then be capped

02:40

and retained by the kindly loving shareholders of keurig vertical

02:44

versus horizontal Good ways to emerge and good ways to

02:48

have a baby too But we're a g rated site 00:02:51.243 --> [endTime] so we're just just saying moving on Oh

Up Next

Finance: What is Spread To Treasuries?
3 Views

Spread to treasuries is an indication of risk associated with a given debt or bond offering.

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)