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Supposedly TDA does have PM (portfolio margin) capabilities and TOS legacy account holders will continue to have PM, but nowhere on TDA's site does it remotely mention PM. On Friday I spoke to Scott Sheridan and ostensibly they will open new PM accounts in a ~ month from now after the...

I'm really curious to see how end of month August numbers end up for you, lazard. At one level I'm guessing your bias towards FI has led you to avoid the equity bloodbath (though the market is only down 2% this week, despite all the volatility we experienced). Given your bias towards...

vol on levered ETFs tends to be extremely overpriced so I'd remain hesitant on buying puts on these 3x bear funds. moreover with 3x leverage, overtime you have to deal with the lovely statistical issue of autocorrelation.

Touche. When real money is on the line traders/investors/etc start to act irrationally *gasp* and usually make some rash decisions. Papermoney is great for testing out a strategy and/or seeing how a product works. But I'd be wary of anyone saying he/she can replicate their paper money returns...

Hey ETers I'm just trying to figure out the appropriate scenario for each of these option strategies. As a guy with a reg-T margin account I get far more margin relief through directional butterflies than for front spreads (+1X-2). In portfolio margin, however, these front spreads seem far...

Interesting. Thanks for the clarification of your earlier example, I can now see why you would relate an option's volatility as the premium which would imply the probability of a hurricane in the property insurance field.

Thanks for the information rew :). On a slightly separate note, I'm wondering what is the appropriate way to assess implied volatility? Technically it's plausible that the front months volatility drops a significant amount and the stock moves up, but the further back months volatility...

Thanks for the clarification dmo :). However in regards to your statement that the volatility is akin to the probability of the option expiring ITM I believe is slightly off, if anything (and again this statement too is also fallacious from a mathematical perspective but it has been used at...

Hey ETers, I'm slightly at a loss as to how to attribute the reason as to why a put sale can be a profitable despite the underlying not moving and the IV remaining constant, yet only the passage of time. Long story short, let's assume I've sold some $10 puts 4 months ago on a biotech...

Hey Everyone, So I was looking at the volume of exchange traded option contracts across large cap underlyings (i.e. XOM, AAPL, GOOG) and I kept thinking to myself WTF how does even a small hedge fund with $100 AUM even do a simple vertical spread on a month to month basis) given the lack of...

I tend to agree with MTE and others that I would call it being short the condor as opposed to "long the condor." That being said if one were to apply this methodology to butterflies it would be deemed as "short the butterfly" which I haven't heard/read too often. In fact, I would associate that...

Not fair spindr0 :P Usually I ask some pretty good questions. This time I got hosed and asked a pretty silly one.

HOLY SHIT I feel REALLY dumb right about now :/

Hey Everyone, I was wondering how we could calculate the 2 standard deviation move in an underlying by using IV. Everyone and their mom knows about the 1 standard deviation calculation which is simply: Price of Underlying X IV X sqrt (Calendar Trading Days/365) If someone could direct...

Is the vol term structure for indexes almost always lower IV for front months and higher for back months (barring rare events i.e. flash crash)? While I know volatility is higher in an expiration cycle where there are earnings for a stock, is it almost always true that front month IV < back...

My friend is one of dailyfx's main contributors and you're right. The guy is bullish on the buck like nobody's business. He just cannot see EUR/USD sustaining these levels, but given the leveraged nature of FX trading and/or the futures, the best way to play to USD strength is options on either...

IF you use TOS you can see what's going on in ISE's COB. (see screenshot) :) I guess the only exchange that's left is PHLX. However I once had a butterfly spread rejected when I routed to it to the PHLX. The TOS rep I called up couldn't figure out why either and put me on hold. He...

I wonder if that customer extensively used margin when trading? Given TOS's exorbitantly high margin rates relative to IB, I believe if you use margin quite a bit then you're better suited to choosing IB as a broker. That being said, I loaded the demo of IB's TWS and nearly tore my hair out...

Thanks for the insight Nazz. BTW why did you have to summarize my earlier post to make it "family friendly" we're traders who naturally have the mouth of a sailor :P

Care to explain how hedging with the underlying assuming HV is greater than the IV you shorted leads to a negative replication error?