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Blame the Democrats too, they voted for it. Ted Kennedy was right behind Bush on that bill.

This is almost as good as failed_trad3r's earlier guaranteed to make money trading scheme of simultaneously buying and selling the same currency pair. He'll be the next George Soros!

The scariest thing about Obama is his choices for judges (including at the federal circuit court level, not just the supreme court). We'll have leftist judges discovering all sorts of strange laws lurking in the penumbras and emanations of the "living Constitution" for decades to come.

What I notice is that the same people saying that gold is in a bubble now are the ones who were telling people to stay away from gold when it was at $300. Let's face it, the vast majority of people in the financial community regard gold as a quaint anachronism, if not a barbaric relic. For as...

No, I don't have a naked short. For European options I can always hold until expiration, when both the long and short options are guaranteed to be worth their intrinsic value. The worst that can happen is that my debit put spread is worth 0. For American options there is the complication that...

In the options forum there is a guy with an IB account who posted the strange case of where his SPY 119/114 put debit spread (long the 119 puts, short the 114 puts) was auto liquidated yesterday at a loss. Apparently he had no margin positions at all, the auto liquidation happened during the...

Was there some other margined position you had that was so underwater it forced the liquidation of other stuff, namely your 119/114 SPY put spread? If that was the case, then the problem comes down to a program that doesn't know how to close a spread properly. Otherwise, we're still left with...

The ACLU never met an illegal immigrant it didn't like. Right now the ACLU is setting up a lawsuit against Arizona for trying to enforce immigration law, just as earlier they sued the town of Hazelton, PA for the same reason.

I always assume that Google and all the social networking sites are simply the public face of the National Security Agency, and act accordingly.

Greek riots? Delta and gamma stomping all over vega and breaking theta's windows. Oh wait, this isn't the options forum.

If the Tea Partiers were black it would be called "The One Million Man March".

I know of few if any investors who think they can time the bottom of a stock perfectly. So often they'll take an initial position and plan to buy more if the stock gets cheaper. Alternatively, they can take an initial position and sell some puts, thus getting a consolation prize if the cheaper...

What's a "gate day"?

The weird thing is that Goldman Sachs has long been a major contributor to the Democratic party.

I think the derivatives they're most concerned about regulating are the ones that aren't traded on exchanges -- credit default swaps and such. So far as options on stocks, indexes, or futures go, some people lost a bundle during the crisis and some made a bundle, but nobody defaulted and asked...

Yes, I just asked by broker about the "assigned bear call spread" issue and he told me that within 10 minutes after the short call becomes a short stock position it will be automatically closed out. Anyhow, to answer the OP's question (how to short in an IRA without suffering overmuch from...

Well, that's a great strategy for people who can figure out which options are going to be the 10 baggers (as opposed to the vastly more common 0 baggers). Me, I just try to get a steady 5% per month on iron condors, double diagonals, and circus calendars. Yes, I'll occasionally buy a straight...

We have legalized slavery in all 50 states. It's called the income tax.

Here's what weirds me out. I can't short stocks in my IRA. I can't even short stocks if I buy protective calls, ensuring a finite worst case loss. (I checked with my broker about that.) But I *can* sell bear call vertical spreads, with American style options. So what happens if the short...

Of course if the efficient market hypothesis was true then it would have been perfectly rational to buy internet stocks in 2000 when the Nasdaq was above 4000. After all, everybody else was, and the aggregate market can't be wrong according to the efficient market hypothesis. I don't think...