An airbag does nothing for the entire life of the car — until the one moment it's needed, when it fires instantly and exactly once. That's the whole design philosophy of the Airbag product: it holds your positions through the quarter and stays silent, until a danger level is crossed — then it protects you, hard.
What it watches
Your holding is wrapped in a structure (shares + a protective put + income legs). The Airbag watches every strike live off the real-time feed. The level that matters most is the institutional strike — where the big players are defending. Above it, dealer support holds; cross below it and the move accelerates (negative gamma). That crossing is the trigger to act.
How it fires — and why it never sells your shares
On impact it buys the matching current-expiry option — a put to cap the downside, a call on the upside. It does not sell your stock, because selling into a fast move leaves you exposed to the snap-back reversal. Buying the option caps the loss and keeps you in the position if it recovers.
Engineered never to miss
If an airbag doesn't deploy in the crash, the consequences are severe — so the firing path is built to be certain: a single-fire latch (never a double order), a deterministic order id with read-back confirmation, retry every tick until it's placed, and a loud alert (and email) if the broker is offline at the moment of impact.
You stay in control
- Hard pause — stops all trading instantly; alerts keep coming, but no order fires until you resume.
- Resume never looks back — on resume it asks, per touched strike, "did you handle this yourself?" so it never double-fires or falsely protects. If a strike is still in the money and you didn't handle it, it fires now.
- Roll anything — move any leg forward or backward, your call, either through the system or just mark it after you did it at the broker.
Margin or cash account. Survival-first: the Airbag caps the loss and buys you time to decide — it's the safety system under everything you hold. Not advice; size and arm it deliberately.
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