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.
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Finance: What is The Difference Between ...6 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is the difference between a horizontal
merger and a vertical merger Okay Mergers let's talk rock
As in a feller he was kind of the king
of mergers both vertical and horizontal Let's Talk about what
comprises each of these things All right in the energy
industry specifically oil Ah horizontal monopoly would exist if a
company owned all the oil wells in the world And
in fact for a short time opec owned well it
was very close to a monopoly at least an enormous
percentage of all the oil wells in the world such
that they were able to constrain supply create panic and
increase prices dramatically some five hundred percent and change the
world during the nineteen seventies when we had a very
weak president going against them and here's what inflation adjusted
prices for a barrel of oil looked like in that
period So that's a horizontal monopoly like where you own
all the sources of oil coming out of the ground
horizontal So what's a vertical monopoly Well in the process
of processing oil a lot has to happen for the
system to work right first step you have to pull
All the oil out of the ground right the oil
well but then you have to process it or synthesize
it from dinosaur coop into well something that's actually usable
in your lexus with the turbo engine Then because the
world demand is continuous you have to store the oil
and then distributed continuously forever and ever and ever and
eventually the retail customer buyer has to be ableto pull
up into a gas station think real estate here and
fill her up So if you owned a vertical monopoly
while you would own the discovery and mining of oil
the synthesis or processing of it or refining of it
as it's called in the industry you don't a storage
company a trucking and distribution company and while then a
bunch of gas stations well that would be a fully
integrated vertical monopoly So when horizontal and vertical mergers get
discussed they get framed under this format So let's say
we're coric coffee machines and we want a vertical merger
in our business because we're sick and tired of paying
coffee growers twelve cents a cup for something well that
cost them less than a penny So we at keurig
Decide to buy our own coffee plantation roasting and grinding
and processing company so that we can supply our own
coffee in our own little cups Well that would be
a vertical merger in the coffee business And it often
makes a lot of sense because all that profit that's
been given out to coffee vendors selling to the kindly
loving caffeinated folks at koi rig with then be capped
and retained by the kindly loving shareholders of keurig vertical
versus horizontal Good ways to emerge and good ways to
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
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