Recent content by willem

If you're not sure what the definition of 'parabolic' is, just look at the charts from 1:53 - 2:11 CT. When the 30Y crossed 139, I was thinking, 'hmm, guess I should put a sell order at R3 after all.' Before I could put it in, *bang*, they swept the book and then pulled it back down 2.5...

Today's a good example: ES and ZB are down, ZN is up (10:45am CT). You also need to watch the US$. I've found the inverse correlation is strongest for short time periods on events and economic news releases -- jobless claims, GDP, etc. ES and Treasuries immediately go in opposite directions...

Hope you were able to trade it. Back to the weather market. Thought we were all done for the day until just before noon. No volume, and then bang -- corn, beans, and wheat off to the races. :cool: Wheat's still weak -- need some follow-through next week.

"Rain grows grain", as they say. But not if it hasn't been planted. Actually, there are some guys around here (central IL) who planted during the warm dry period we had in early April who have to re-plant due to all the water and low soil temps. But, whenever things do dry out, planting is...

Except no one can plant -- it won't stop raining. "About 9 percent of the corn crop was planted in the U.S. as of April 24, compared with 46 percent at the same time last year, the Department of Agriculture said in an April 25 report." (earlier Bloomberg story)

So much for the weather market. Corn is limit down on slowing export sales, according to Bloomberg. I saw 137,000+ on the ask for July a minute ago -- that's about 20% of the OI. Should be an interesting reopen tonight....

+1 on this. I would also say that fills are only one part of sim trading. Especially if you're scalping, a good sim helps you work on all of the other facets as well. I've spent a couple of hundred hours with Think or Swim's OnDemand feature (tick-by-tick playback of equities, options, and...

However many levels you go out, the last level has to be a binary option where if you're right, you win all the money in the world, and if you're wrong, you lose it all. The ultimate leverage. But who would take the other side of that trade? :D

Wow - an 8 std dev move after hours. Even when you get the volatility collapse tomorrow, you're probably dead if you sold naked calls today. :eek:

There were 5 calls traded on 9/10 at $0.65 - that's the last trade date, so these are very illiquid. The current spread is 0.45 - 1.10, so the bid has more than doubled from when you checked it before, even though SONC was down more than 3% today. My suggestion would be to learn more about...

Spreads are dynamic, not static, and change in relation to a lot of factors. It may be possible to trade inside the spread, although in this case the volume and OI are pretty small. propseeker had a good response to this in my thread on market microstructure: "the market making algos...

I'm surprised no one has challenged this assumption. Can you give some evidence that price action is random, controlling for different time frames?

Yes -- it definitely reinforces my experience to stick with narrow-spread, highly liquid ITM options for my intraday trading (SPY, IWM, etc.). Thanks for the thoughts so far, guys. The Sinclair book is definitely moving up on my reading list if it talks about options market-making. -Will

There is -- it's called Delta. Understanding how Delta works is far more important than having a chart. Good luck - hope you're simtrading to begin with.