Industry signal

A dollar-neutral long-short that reads institutional options positioning at industry level. Fires when an industry's flow z-score leaves its own two-sigma band. Two fully-funded legs, 200% gross, market beta near zero, composition rotates through the cycle.

1. Summary

The research question behind this piece is whether institutional options positioning carries a tradable signal at the industry level, rather than only at the single-name level documented in the flagship study. Trading an industry rather than its constituents does two things the single-name book cannot. It catches new trends early, at the point where institutional investors are accumulating net long positions across the whole cohort. And it reduces the impact of idiosyncratic noise on any single ticker, leaving the rotation itself as the object of the trade.