Portfolio Protection Strategies: A study on the protective put and its extensions

Abstract: The need among investors to manage volatility has made itself painfully clear over the past century, particularly during sudden crashes and prolonged drawdowns in the global equity markets. This has given rise to a liquid portfolio insurance market in the form of options, as well as attracted the attention of many researchers. Previous literature has, in particular, studied the effectiveness of the widely known protective put strategy, which serially buys a put option to protect a long position in the underlying asset. The results are often uninspiring, pointing towards few, if any, protective benefits with high option premiums as a main concern. This raises the question if there are ways to improve the protective put strategy or if there are any cost-efficient alternatives that provide a relatively be.er protection. This study extends the previous literature by investigating potential improvements and alternatives to the protective put strategy. In particular, three alternative put spread strategies and one collar strategy are constructed. In addition, a modified protective put this introduced to mitigate the path dependency in a rolling protection strategy.   The results show that no option-based protection strategy can dominate the other in all market situations. Although reducing the equity position is generally more effective than buying options, we report that a collar strategy that buys 5% OTM put options and sells 5% OTM call options has an attractive risk-reward profile and protection against drawdowns. We also show that the protective put becomes more effective, both in terms of risk-adjusted return and tail protection, for longer maturities.