Is there a way to intuitively derive the formulas for the investment value, maximum loss, maximum gains and breakeven for the strategies or will we have to memorize them ??
Specifically for the strategies of bull calls, calender spreads and collar
Please help as I am finding the topic extremely hard
If you know what a call does, you can easily write a “map” of stock prices and come up with break even, max loss, max gain and stock prices each. Same with the put.
you can write the map for anything: covered calls, protective puts, credit spreads, debit spreads, collars, condors, etc.
Learn the payoff diagrams for each strategy. Once you know those, the rest is cake.
Of course, that’s not intuition; it’s understanding.