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Foolishly you failed to use birth control and now you have a pregnant butterfly.

A fair question. The problem is that on Tuesday and Wednesday SPX was high enough that it was hard to find a good point where you could stop out. I don't think you could ever have got out of a short 1170/1180 call spread for less than 2.00 during that time, not much better than the 2.95 it...

If there's one thing you should have learned by now it's that Wall Street will make money by any means it can get away with. If a trader is long 10,000 SPX 1170 calls and he can make them worth a few million dollars by doing a quick trade in the futures market that loses him one million...

My SPX chart shows an opening price of 1171.85, not at all far from the settlement price. Of course that price lasted about 5 microseconds, and the price plunged from there. As I'm sure you know, the settlement price is not taken directly from the SPX index. It's calculated from the first...

Israel keeps all its illegal settlements in the West Bank, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Palestinians in the West Bank have been kept in a brutal military occupation for years on end. Israel has abandoned its settlements in Gaza (they weren't worth the trouble of defending) but has...

I understand what expectation is. I also understand what a bid/ask spread is. Even if the mid-point price of an option is priced so that it's expected return is exactly 0, when an OTM option has a bid/ask of 0.20/0.25 and you buy at 0.25 your expectation is negative.

Looks like the poster before me got the closer number. The official expiration price: 1172.95 Given the size of the spike (+7) followed by an immediate crash, you'll have a hard time convincing me this wasn't manipulated for the benefit of the guys long calls or short puts at 1170.

The price is posted at noon here: http://www.cboe.com/data/Settlement.aspx Looking at the charts, SPX in the first minute opened at 1171.80 or so (a large gap up from yesterday's close), and has since collapsed to 1161. The expiration price used for option settlement is not based directly...

Going long on far out of the money options is indeed very much like buying lottery tickets. The expectation is negative, just like for lottery tickets, but usually not quite so bad as the lottery tickets.

The expiration price for SPX is based on the Friday opening price of each of its component stocks. So, although SPX closed at 1165.50 the expiration value can be higher than that or lower, depending on how things go tomorrow. So yes, the bear call spread side of your iron condor *might* expire...

Well the SPX options, which cease trading at 4 PM on Thursday and expire at the Friday open, still have a fair amount of time value priced into them right up to 3:59:59 on Thursday. Today the SPX closed at 1165.76. The 1165 calls, with 0.76 of intrinsic value, have a closing price of 3.80...

Well the right wing Israelis seem to want to drive all the Palestinians into the sea, so that about balances things out. I don't have a dog in that hunt.

I guess it's funny if you're not a Palestinian. Or if you're a typical American, totally ignorant of the history of the place.

I'm not a fan of Obama and even less of his choice of church and preacher, but in all fairness anyone who dares criticize Israel will be called an anti-Semite by the Zionists. If you're Jewish and criticize Israel you're called a self hating Jew. Grown ups just have to realize who is slinging...

No, it's a rogue nation because it keeps stealing more and more land from the Palestinians.

Of course if I had any children I wouldn't entrust them to fringe crazies. That's why I'd home school them. The public schools are dominated by fringe crazies, and not just in Texas.

"Social science" is like "military intelligence" -- a contradiction in terms. Social "scientists" start with a predetermined political agenda and then pretend that science supports it.

I am an American, you jerk. But you are right -- they're not my congressmen. 99.75% of them don't represent me in any way. BTW, you must be an American (who attended our public schools). The phrase is "weigh in on American affairs", not "way in on American affairs".

Israelis are a 20th century invention. By ethnically cleansing the Arab people from what is now Israel proper, and then stealing more of their land on the West Bank, the Israelis have created the Palestinian people.

Me, I'm tired of hearing about how a country that tried very hard to sink the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967 (and still lies, saying it was an "accident") and that spies on us more than any other country except maybe China (there are lots of "Free Jonathan Pollard" signs in Israel) is our treasured ally.