Who Is Imran Lakha?

• Imran Lakha is a world-class options trader. With over 20 years of experience across all global macro asset classes, he has become an expert in the world of institutional options trading.

• Imran started his career with Credit Suisse before progressing to other top-tier banks including Citigroup and Bank of America. At Bank of America, he became the head of the European Options trading desk.

• After collecting a wealth of institutional insights into the options-trading world, Imran soon realized that he found immense fulfillment in training junior colleagues and seeing them develop into extremely successful traders.

• As a result, Imran founded Options Insight in 2018, an educational platform where he shares his experience to help others leverage options to hedge or speculate on market movements.

• Real Vision members can now learn from Imran’s best insights through his Options Trading course on the Real Vision Academy.

What Is Imran Lakha’s Trading Strategy?

Imran understands that trading involves finding an edge, whatever that may be. For him, he focuses on leveraging volatility, in particular, implied volatility, which is the market's expectation of what can happen in the future.

While holding an investment portfolio focused on longer-term time horizons, Imran integrates options contracts to earn extra income around existing positions and to provide a hedge that helps him to protect his portfolio. All of his options options-trading strategies are usually completed within a two- to six-week window.

To achieve success when trading options, Imran places a lot of weight on understanding what aspects of the market are already priced in. One of the things that he has learned during his trading career is that markets are forward-looking. If it’s already in the Financial Times, it is likely old news. Therefore, it’s important to sort noise from signal and get ahead of truly market-moving fundamentals.

Imran implements his options options-trading strategies across a multitude of asset classes including indices, individual stocks, forex, and commodities. He believes that holding a cross-asset view allows him to better position himself as an options trader. However, by trading such a wide variety, Imran knows there is a danger of spreading himself too thin.

Fortunately, options contracts help Imran mitigate this danger as the contracts enable him to limit drawdowns. By only allocating a small premium to an idea, he remains safe in the knowledge that only a set amount will be lost if a trade goes against him.

One Of of Imran’s Best Trades

Imran believes that he was very fortunate to be able to trade through the 2008 financial crisis; , a period where volatility reached levels never seen before. He describes it as one of the highlights of his trading career.

While traders working with convertibles, single stocks, and bonds imploded, and, therefore, were unable to implement trading strategies, Imran was lucky to be working within the index options market, a market that was still extremely liquid. It is this fortune that Imran believes allowed his trading desk to significantly outperform the rest of the market as the financial crisis unfolded.

Even though the majority of banks were close to collapse, by understanding the drivers of the crash, Imran’s team was able to turn the increased levels of volatility into one of the most profitable trading years ever.

In addition to turning record volatility for profits, trading through the 2008 financial crisis has also helped Imran navigate the latest Covid-19 crash of 2020. While many traders were not expecting volatility to increase to such high levels, the experience of 2008 meant Imran was far better prepared than most and, once again, was able to capitalize.

What Is Options Insight?

After enjoying the process of training junior colleagues in top-tier banks all around the world, Imran decided to found his own educational platform in 2018. Options Insight was created to help both institutional and retail traders become familiar with, and navigate, the options markets.

Options Insight is designed to make options trading more accessible. In Imran’s own words, understanding and using options is not rocket science and doesn’t have to be scary.

To that end, Imran places a huge emphasis on breaking options trading down into intuitive bite-sized pieces. Instead of using textbooks and getting traders to memorize complex formulae, Options Insight breaks options trading down into first principles. By understanding those first principles, traders can begin to leverage options contracts within their own investment strategies.

The courses and training at Options Insight are available for all types of traders, from entry-level students to experienced portfolio managers. If the interest in options trading is there, Options Insight can help.