Outlook: Time vs time. Taught in full in Lesson 25, Calendars, diagonals & the advanced shelf. This page is the reference card.
Illustration, not a recommendation. The strikes and premiums on this page are fixed teaching figures, not live quotes, and no strategy suits every account or every market. Read the full disclaimer.
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What you must believe
NIFTY loiters near the strike while the front week's rent melts faster than the back month's. You are also, knowingly, long volatility: rising IV helps, falling IV hurts.
Construction
Sell the weekly 25,000 CE at ₹120, buy the monthly 25,000 CE at ₹248. Net debit ₹128 per unit: ₹8,320 per lot, the theoretical worst case.
weekly 25,000 CE (sold)monthly 25,000 CE (owned)
The calendar's engine. Over the same seven days the sold weekly melts from ₹120 to zero on the steep end of the rent curve while the owned monthly eases from ₹248 to about ₹217. The widening gap, about ₹89 per unit, is the whole income, and it survives only while NIFTY stays near the strike.
The numbers, before entry
Max loss: about the ₹8,320 debit, on any large move either way
Best week: about +₹5,785 with NIFTY parked at the strike (weekly dies, monthly loses only ₹31)
Net vega: about +₹11 per IV point (monthly ₹21 minus weekly ₹10)
Margin: the sold weekly is covered by the monthly; brokers charge modest spread margin
Greeks profile
Delta-neutral at the strike, short front-week gamma, net long theta while spot behaves, long vega. The only common structure that collects rent while owning volatility.
Realistic expectations
The best case is genuinely good (₹5,785 on ₹8,320 in a week) and requires the market's cooperation in going nowhere. Big moves and IV drops are both losses. Two flavours exist: the quiet-pin calendar (boring week, low IV) and the event calendar (sell the inflated front across a scheduled event), and they must never be confused mid-trade.
Management rules
Strike at a level the market keeps returning to: heavy OI, tested repeatedly
Close or reset when spot drifts 150+ points from the strike
Check IV rank with the sign flipped: this is the structure that wants cheap IV
With other strategies
The condor's opposite-vega twin: condors monetise rich IV, calendars cheap IV; together they cover every regime the IV ruler (Lesson 19) can read
Against the iron butterfly, it is the other pin bet: same strike logic, opposite volatility exposure; the IV rank decides which pin instrument this week deserves
Rolled short legs turn it into a rent machine: sell next week's call after this week's dies, again and again against the same monthly, the index cousin of the covered call cycle
With a directional lean it becomes the diagonal (next card), and stretched to a deep ITM long it becomes the poor man's covered call
Common mistakes
Holding through an event and losing to the gap and the back-month crush at once
Ignoring the vega sign: pinned spot, red P&L, mystery solved by the IV chart
Opening it too early, when both legs sit on the flat part of the decay curve