How to Compare Broken Wing Butterflies
In the intricate dance of Broken Wing Butterflies, true insight emerges not from rote formulas, but from the visual wisdom of comparing every strike adjustment, revealing mastery in flexibility and informed precision.
Key Moments
Visualize Your Edge
Learn to construct and visually compare multiple Broken Wing Butterfly spreads by directly dragging strikes on a real-time chart, analyzing risk profiles side-by-side.
Demystifying the Skew
Understand how even slight adjustments to a Broken Wing Butterfly's strikes profoundly alter its risk, breakevens, and expiration behavior, moving beyond static graphs.
Deconstruct for Clarity
Toggle between combined and individual leg views to grasp how each component contributes to the overall payoff of a Broken Wing Butterfly, fostering deeper strategic comprehension.
Precision Strike Selection
Utilize visual comparison to eliminate guesswork in strike selection, precisely tailoring your Broken Wing Butterfly to align with specific market outlooks or to mitigate unwanted risk exposures.
Broken Wing Butterflies are one of the more flexible spreads in an options trader's toolkit — but flexibility comes with a trade-off. With so many ways to skew the strikes, it's not always obvious which version of the trade actually fits your market outlook. In our latest video, we break down how to build and compare Broken Wing Butterflies visually, using the Flux tool to click and drag strikes directly on the chart.
What You'll Learn
In this video, we walk through:
Building put and call Broken Wing Butterflies by dragging strikes directly on the chart
Using the Compare feature to overlay multiple spreads and visually analyze risk profiles and expiration lines side by side
Toggling between Combined and Compare views to see how individual legs behave alone versus as a single combo spread
Adjusting strikes to eliminate upside or downside risk based on your market outlook
Why Visualizing the Comparison Matters
A Broken Wing Butterfly is really just a butterfly with one wing widened (or narrowed) to skew the risk in one direction. That skew changes everything about the trade — where your risk sits, where your breakevens fall, and how the position behaves as expiration approaches. Rather than relying on formulas or a single static risk graph, Flux lets you see multiple versions of the same trade side by side, so you can compare how shifting a strike by even a few dollars changes the shape of the risk curve.
Switching between Combined and Compare views also makes it easier to understand why a Broken Wing Butterfly behaves the way it does — you can see each leg's individual payoff before watching them merge into the single combo position.
Put It to Use
Whether you're leaning bullish, bearish, or just trying to eliminate risk on one side of a trade, being able to see the comparison before you place it takes a lot of the guesswork out of strike selection. Watch the full video above to see the process from start to finish.
NavigationTrading changes the way traders learn and approach options. By bringing market direction, strategy, risk, and trade construction into a visual framework, we help traders move beyond formulas and predefined strategies to better understand how trades are built, behave, and evolve.