Search results

Section 1256 specifically uses MTM with year-end values. There's no "election" involved. It's just a totally different tax treatment from equities. As far as how you actually file your returns, you'll have to ask a professional. But I believe it's this...

Basically, the answer is you can't avoid these taxes legally. Unless you're trading a tax-deferred account (IRA/retirement account), as long as you maintain your US residency, you *must* report all global income (including capital gains) at the end of the year to the IRS, and be taxed...

Keep in mind foreign citizens with US residency are still "US persons", and pay the same taxes all US citizens do. Non-US persons, however, wouldn't even have a social security number or EIN. They certainly would not pay capital gains tax to the United States government. However, I believe...

I asked this question earlier in a different thread... but any insight on copper options? It looked like it was barely traded. Are the spreads correspondingly disgustingly wide?

See: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=187779&perpage=6&pagenumber=7

Yes, this is just negative gamma scalping, which has been discussed here on numerous previous threads. There's no magic to it. Of course, you can make money if you do it "correctly"... but risks are still substantial. When you go short the underlying when the price goes up, you're...

I'm not usually this much of a pain in the ass... ... but just note: very difficult to initiate a straddle where *both* options are NOT in-the-money. :)

Seems to me you'd need a *very large* move in statistical volatility for IV 6 months out to be significantly affected. I doubt there's really a closed-end solution to your question... but I personally would bring it in quite a bit. But of course, the other side of that coin is you have...

Ironic timing, considering corn was limit down, and soybean/wheat down 3%+ today.

Yes, but do you not realize that if gold goes down, you now have additional risk of loss because the dollar has gone up? Anyways, this is as far in this discussion as I'm interested in going.

Annualized gold volatility is running ~20%. Rising 125 (~10%) at *some point* in the next 5 months? From a probability point of view, it's *not* an unlikely event. You definitely would not need "huge" volatility to see gold move by 10% over 5 months. Uhm, except now you're also exposed to...

If it was really a bad idea, he would go the opposite direction and make a good idea out of it. I think, just like many other option trades, it's a "fine" idea. You're probably right that not both options will be ITM at the same time. But there's no free lunch here, what you'll get out...

I thought the foundation of modern stochastic finance assumed continuous process, rather than discreet/jump models. This is what allows us to use Ito's.

Queen's English.

Maybe we need to stop pretending that everyone's doing exactly the same thing. I for one trade a short volatility black-box application that benefits very much from every second of availability I can squeeze out of the system. I have redundant colocated servers in addition to E Cermak...

What are the "appropriate" connections? How do you assure your physical connections aren't being snooped? What's the latency to the various exchanges? How much redundancy do you have? In case of hard drive or power supply failure, how long until you're back up? How large is your IT...

ivolatility as previously mentioned, and poweropt.com is another service I've used.

What about those who wait until the second trading day of the new year?

Tax considerations? If the plan is to hold the outright for an extended amount of time and qualify for long-term cap gains... Just a thought.

Breaking derivative contracts on the basis of poor financial sophistication is pretty common... long history of this. These aren't exchange-traded positions; the counterparty isn't a clearinghouse. When these investment banks took the other side of these investments, they should've...