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Holding to expiration is an edge case that has interest to some of us but you're right, probably not to most. There are a strategies that take advantage of the fact that a cash settled option doesn't cost you anything to settle, no bid/ask spread or commission. And the bid/ask spread at the end...

Good point on the calendar spreads, I don't trade those so hadn't thought about it. I guess the question is why the SPX weeklies close at 3:00 then.

That's very interesting, I never noticed that before. I dug into the spec and while the S&P 500 PM settles are based on "the official closing price of the S&P 500 Index as reported by Standard & Poor's", OEX and XEO are based on "the last (closing) reported sales price in the primary market of...

To clarify/extend that a bit, cash settled pm-close index options close at 3pm CT on the day they expire. For example the weekly S&P 500 options stop trading on Friday at 3pm CT and settle based on the 3 pm CT S&P 500 index level.

Thanks for the additional info. I'm fleeing IB as well, so looks like I'll be making the call rounds. (Since the stats knowledge of most posters here appears to be non-existent, your "orthogonal" reference was probably lost on most, but yes, I'd say brilliant use of the word in a sentence!).

I've got what I'll admit up front are probably some stupid questions, but can you provide some insight on how you're clearing and accessing the exchange, basically how one would go about getting set up with CME Direct? Thanks in advance.

This is finance 101, something that loyek590 has clearly taken and something it appears you've either not taken or forgotten. The yield on a bond is directly correlated to its risk of default. You want more yield, you accept more risk. If the risk free rate is 0% and the bond is 8%, the market...

And those 8% "blue chip" bonds have a 6% chance of defaulting, if you take 2% to be the risk free rate. The risk of default is completely priced into bonds, especially large U.S. company bonds. That's why some trade at a very small premium to Treasuries and some at a much larger premium. If you...

loyek590, you just made the critical point "it is all efficiently priced". Any kind of carry trade involves risk, and the risk is exactly equal to the extra profit you get. Because of the continuous small interest payments, our brains tend to see this kind of risk as different than the risk of...

Maybe undergrad, although if you're talking a top university there are 20 equally qualified students representing every race for every spot. Remember there are over 35,000 valedictorians graduating in the U.S. every year, and as a "wrong race" white student I somehow managed to get into a good...

I'm sympathetic to your frustration with what is essentially a fake tuition number provided which as you pointed out is much like the essentially fake price for medical procedures. However, I as an alumni donated money to our endowment specifically so that my university would provide free...

Most of tuition at most top schools is paid for by the endowment, not student's parent's cutting checks. So what you're advocating for is already the status quo.

Great, I think we've all moved to agreement. You've started to actually look at the CPI and realize that items like rent and medical costs you didn't think were there are, rather than dismissing it out of hand, we all agree that 4 pound bags of sugar aren't a plot by "the man". Clearly CPI is...

I don't know about Harvard, but I know Stanford doesn't charge any tuition for children who's parents make less than $100,000/year, and doesn't charge tuition or room and board for children who's parents make less than $60,000 per year. It's graduated as you go up past that point. So essentially...

I'm pretty sure when spacewiz said "And don't tell me those "independent public and private sources" you mention are really independent or worthy of trust and not just manipulated." he was saying the CPI number was being manipulated. Or when eurusdzn said "Regardless of input costs over time you...

Which is it, an academic argument or a ridiculous exercise of actually taking pictures of prices of food staples in your grocery store, which would seem to epitomize the real world? Your solution for showing why we shouldn't trust the published CPI numbers is.....?

Just once, make a concrete argument of what part of CPI is faked. Sure any measure of inflation can be critiques on things like what should be considered "core", those are discussions among intelligent well meaning people. This is a bunch of people claiming CPI is faked, the numbers aren't real...

If you believe that the hundreds of GS employees in the Labor Department who published CPI over the past several years lied about the numbers, you're a "conspiracy theorist", no way around that. Are you now saying they all lied about the inflation numbers and published a false CPI index every...

In my 40s, I posted my background previously in this thread but since der_kommissar claimed that one post ever of my background on ET was me "constantly give us your "qualifications" I won't repeat them and really by background is irrelevant. Maybe you haven't read the thread, where I've been...

Just to clarify, a 5% error would be actual inflation of a commodity measured at 1.05% when the official number was 1%. I know, percent of a percent is a bit confusing, sorry for not clarifying that initially. If you're convinced all the government is lying about the data in the CPI, then you...