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IB issues aside, only one of you knows what you're talking about. "Give Up" means something specific: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/giveup.asp It doesn't mean he's giving up on support.

Quote from Soon2Bgreat: -How can my unrealized loss grow...i thought the point of an option was that you can only lose the premium? ($16) You cannot lose more than that. If you're losing money on the position, your unrealized loss will converge on the premium for the option. Make sure...

Everyone. Option exercises are randomly assigned by the OCC in a batch during the night. If it appears you have instantly exercised your call, it's only because the broker is making it appear that way. In other words, there's no such thing as an instant exercise "during market hours".

If I got it right, you bought $7500 in short dated SPY options and sold $14,500 worth of SPY short right before the 2/27 crash. It seems unrealistic to call this a "$30k" account. You committed 75% of it to two trades on one underlying going in one direction. Any reasonable trader would...

You missed the key question. Futures or Equity? You can trade options on both, and the CFTC regulates one, SEC the other.

Most important is whether you're looking at American or European style options. You can put together boxes (and C/R) on OEX that are insanely profitable. Except you'll get assigned immediately, and generally only in the case when you're guaranteed to lose money. (OEX is cash settled, so an...

It depends on what options you're trading. If you're covering 8 different equities, for example, having 8 monitors might be useful to show a few charts of various timeframes, depth of market, order entry window, etc. for each one. No matter what I'm trading, I have one monitor with the S&P...

I think IB might offer Put/Call ratios in their charting tool. In DTN, I can simply query the option chains and total up the open interest and/or volume of the day. I'm sure other data feeds have this sort of information available.

Cash vs margin account doesn't matter. You could stick your money into a risk free CD and earn at least $3.10 if you kept your cash rather than sinking it into stock.

I see no reason the exchanges will regulate automated trading. I (and most screen traders) happen to like that there are 1000s of contracts available at the bid and ask, and the spread is one tick wide. The problem with bid/ask scalping is that it's so easy, a simple computer program can do...

It has nothing to do with whether it's an index or a component, it's the price of the underlying and the volatility. SPX calls have a strike of 1445 ATM. IBM calls have a strike of 95 ATM. The strike of SPX is 15 times the strike of IBM. Take the .0707 vega of IBM, multiply it by 15, and...

For currencies, the commercials are banks. The non-commercials are hedge funds. The non-reportables are the 21yo with Etrade accounts. There are some gray areas that the CFTC is attempting to rework the COT to fix. For example, swaps dealers may be excessively long when true hedgers are...

http://www.cftc.gov/cftc/cftccotreports.htm These guys have charts of the CFTC's COT data if you sign up for a free subscription: http://www.commitmentoftraders.com/index.htm

What derivatives--Futures or equity? What kind of job--broker, quant, prop trader?

This seems like a fairly standard system admin job. Look at monster.com in whatever city/state the job is located in and look under "system administrator".

Sure, you can do spreads or outrights here: http://www.futuresource.com/charts/charts.jsp?s=EDM07-EDM08&o=&a=D&z=610x300&d=medium&b=bar&st=

Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but a rolling contract always uses the front month. When the front month is done (usually about the time liquidity starts to fall off), all back data is adjusted so it lines up with the new contract month, and the new month is added to the contract. In other...

Nightly Business Report is vastly superior to the CNBC tripe, in my opinion. Maria's "feisty" persona is just getting ridiculous--endless questions about topics the interviewees know nothing about. Not too long ago, she was pressing some US Army General to predict the price of oil. She wouldn't...

For analysis, you should definitely find yourself a source of rolling contract data. It'll give you reliable support & resistance levels over months, even though those levels may span multiple contracts. I couldn't live without it. Looking at a single contract (like dec) and then making...

One other suggestion--try starting with a few markets and learn everything you can about them. For example, wheat, soy, corn are all relatively similar in terms of supply, demand, global competition, etc. Read WASDE reports, read the CRB Yearbook about them, put together some spreadsheets...