I don't know whether I qualify as a successful warrant tader (Is my performance sustainable?, I prefer SSFs) but here's some useful stuff I pulled off the SA Warrants website in 2003 - I think it was written by Simon PB: Look for: Lower implied volatility, relative to it's peers. There are two reasons for this, firstly as volatility increases so will a warrant's price (both call or put) and hence lower is better as high volatilities will tend to revert to the mean. Secondly volatility is essentially the measure of risk the issuer assigns to the underlying asset so again lower is better. It is however important to compare volatility levels on the same underlying as two different underlying assets could have very different volatility levels. Higher delta, ideally above 0.40. Delta is often called the percentage chance a warrant has of expiring in-the-money and hence higher is better. Effective gearing within your risk profile, and be careful of to high a gearing (5x or higher), we've crunched the number and most often a higher geared warrant (say +6x) actually makes one less profit as timing becomes even more critical and stop losses tend to get hit more often. Time decay that fits within your trade, in other words for a 10 week trade -3% time decay per week is far to high and you'd need to find a warrant with weekly time decay or closer to 0.5%, yet for a 3 day trade 5% per week is acceptable. More on time decay here Within 20% of being at-the-money. Further an in-the-money warrant will carry even less risk as it will have intrinsic value. No penny warrants, that is those below 20c. Tight spread, that is difference between buy/sell - ideally 1c. At issue here is that as soon as one buys a warrant you effectively give away the spread. If a warrant is priced at 50c/51c and you buy at 51c you have to wait for it to move to 51c/52c before you can sell back to the issuer at break even (excluding costs). Yet is the warrant was at 50c/53c and you brought at 53c you require a 3c (or 3 times more) move by the warrant before you reach break even. I assume you checked the tutorial on this website...
