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Thomas Peterffy, chairman and founder of Timber Hill and Interactive Brokers never went to college. Without drive, ability, and new ideas, education in itself means nothing.

Yes, yes. Infinite time and money allow any trading strategy to be successful eventually.

Great gallows humor. If only it wasn't mostly true!

As others have noted, PM is extremely complex to calculate. Additionally it will be different for highly concentrated positions (i.e. all SPX), and will look at 15-30 different risk arrays simultaneously (vol up 10%, underlying down 30% etc...) and choose the riskiest array at any point in time...

There is no SIPC insurance for commodities accounts at MF. If you are an MF brokerage client, you gotta ask yourself, "Do you feel lucky punk?"

If you send 6 different 5 lot orders, they will be ranked in time priority by CBOE upon receipt by the exchange. Therefore an execution of 24 spreads will result in fills for the first 4 orders (20 contracts), a partial 4 lot for the 5th order, and nothing done on the last order.

The IB rep is correct. While any exchange-listed securities options are required to have a two-sided bid/ask with firm size, even if the strike is newly listed and/or has no open interest, this is not the case with futures options.

Yes, as long as the product in question is listed on those exchanges. While most names trade in .01 increments on spreads, even if the single legs only trade in nickels, some books that are only single or dual listed do not.

I was NOT born into the 1%. My mother escaped from a communist country and came to America at age 16 without speaking English or a penny to her name. My father is a first generation American and the first person in our family to attend college. I attended public school and a state university...

OP, pat yourself on the back for for doing at least two things correctly. First you did a real trade, which teaches you a lot more than any amount of paper trading ever will. Secondly, you knew that you didn't completely understand the risk/reward scenario and you traded in very small size...

Maybe somebody should tell these losers to occupy the ECNs since hardly anything trades on the NYSE/Wall St. anymore.

The original poster's premise was that he already "mostly trade stocks (long & short)". Therefore, options written against these positions act as a hedge, not additional risk.

If you want to trade the underlying for direction and also want to take advantage of the time decay short options provide, you could simply buy-write your positions. That is, if you are long (short) stock, sell a 2-3% OTM call (put) option a month or two out. Depending on time & vol this may be...

IB charges .70 per option contract, .005 per share of stock, and no ticket charges, but you need at least $10k to open an account. Having said that, commissions should never be the focus, the quality of the fill is the most important part of any trade.

I am always curious why somebody cares who is on the other side of their trade when the execution occurs at the price you determined before placing the order. Isn't that the goal? If I want to sell at $1, why is it important who is my contra side? Also, if you pay any attention to Timber...