My out-of-the-money call options are near expiration and won't sell in the open market. What are my choices?

Question

I had attempted to sell my contracts off today but was unsuccessful. They are currently OTM options and will expire tomorrow. What can I do to minimize loss and why was I unable to sell?

Answer 1

Out-of-the-money options close to expiration often have no bids. If no one is willing to pay even $0.01 for them, you will have to let them expire worthless. Your loss essentially already happened when the underlying failed to surpass your strike; you would at best be fighting to salvage pennies now.

Answer 2

As an analogy, consider people betting on an (American) football game between Team A and Team B. Let's make buying the option analogous to betting on Team A. Then selling it is analogous to betting against Team A. The sale price of the option is analogous to the odds a bookie will offer. The expiration date is analogous to the end of the game. Being OTM is analogous to Team A being behind. If you want to sell an option, then you are betting against Team A, and you are asking the buyer to bet for them to win. If Team A is behind, but it's only the first quarter, then there's still a chance that Team A will have a comeback. But as the game goes on, the probability of that happening (given a constant score differential) goes down. Similarly, if the stock price stays the same, then as time goes on the price of an OTM option goes down. This is known as "theta". If you call up a bookie right before the end of the game and tell them that you have, say, $1000 that you want to put down on Team A losing (so you're asking the bookie to bet that Team A will win), the bookie would have to offer really short odds for it to be fair; for instance, they might have to offer $1 to your $1000. And the hassle of setting up the bet is probably worth more than the $1. So they'll just refuse to take that bet.

Similarly, the expectation value of an OTM option the day before expiration will quite likely be so low that it's not worth people's time to make an offer. There are occasional exceptions, such as if an earnings report is coming out right before expiration.

As for minimizing your loss, there's not much you can do now. In the football analogy, if you put down $1000 for Team A to win, and they're down 8 points with 1 minute to go, you've already lost the $1000. Unless you can find a chump, you're not going to find anyone to bet on Team A to win.

Answer 3

You can always sell your calls at the market price (the bid). If the trade did not execute then you are asking for a price greater than the market price.

If the bid is zero then it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to take them off your hands even for mere pennies and you can chalk this one up as a total loss.

The opportunity to minimize your loss occurred some time ago before you entered the rapid theta (time) decay of the last few weeks before expiration.

Answer 4

As others have said, the money is almost certainly already lost, with nothing you can do to get it back.

Most options expire worthless and the person who owned them last loses money on the option. Buying options is something that is often done to "hedge," rather than to generate income. That is, the person buying the option often does not expect to make money on the option. Instead, they buy an option for a stock they already own, as protection against sudden swings in the price of that stock. This is sort of like buying life insurance -- you buy life insurance, but hope you don't have a chance to use it.