Investing
'Degenerate Gambling' in Zero-Day Options Thrills Retail Traders
Speculative options are exploding, opening more everyday investors to a side of trading some compare to gambling.
A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
They’ve become a high-speed, high-risk, high-reward tool in turbulent markets: Options with shelf lives so short they expire in less than a day.
For big investors, these derivatives — “zero-day-to-expiry” options, or 0DTE for short — offer a way to hedge short-term risk in an era when the market flip-flops daily. That’s in theory. In practice, success is far from certain, and even some Wall Street pros don’t fully understand them.