Long-term equity anticipation securities: options with more than a year to expiration, used as a lower-cost stand-in for stock.
LEAPS decay slowly because theta is small far from expiration. Deep in-the-money LEAPS calls with high delta are often used as a substitute for owning shares with less capital, while accepting a finite lifespan and no dividend.
They carry significant vega exposure: buying them when implied-volatility is high means paying up for time.
Example: stock at $100. A two-year $70 call costs $38 with a 0.85 delta. It controls 100 shares of exposure for $3,800 instead of $10,000, with $8 of extrinsic value at risk to time and volatility.
Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.
Time decay of an option's value. The part of an option's price that is only time — its extrinsic value — drains away every day and must reach zero at expiry. The slide is gentle months out and steepest in the final weeks, which is what traders call theta.Delta across the range of prices. Delta says how much a call's price moves for a one-point move in the stock. Far below the strike it is near 0 and the option barely reacts; at the strike it is about 0.50; far above it approaches 1 and tracks the stock.
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