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If you regularly trade a certain strategy (butterflies, condors, vertical spreads, etc.) do you set up your trades at the desire dplace and price (ex. - you're determined to trade a SPY unbalanced butterfly at 170/175/180), or you do you look through the options chains on your preferred...

No I am not.

Question from a novice - I have several relatively delta neutral positions going on a TOS demo (mainly butterflies with calls) that have a theta value of about $10 per day. When the market is open and the options prices are changing, the un-trustable TOS P/L line (as well as the value of the...

I was reading reviews about Interactive Brokers and came across this review that spooked me a bit. It can be found in the following link: http://www.yelp.com/biz/interactive-brokers-llc-greenwich "WARNING!!!! YOUR MARGIN ACCOUNT IS A TICKING TIME BOMB AT INTERACTIVE BROKERS!!!! I'm a...

Thanks for the recommendations. Could you be more specific as to why you don't like TOS/Optionshouse and why you like the others? Also do these brokers even accept individual retail clients? Can't find info on their website, I'll have to call them. I won't be trading huge numbers of options...

What would you do in my situation? I like to trade (close to) delta neutral butterflies with long calls/debit spreads to balance the deltas, and take profit at 8 -10 % of planned capital, which is $4000 per butterfly. I shoot for $320 to $400 per butterfly. The problem is commissions. Butterfly...

True, but I'd rather stick to SPY/IWM because of the familiarity. Bitcoin will surely behave differently than these and it's probably not as liquid of a market.

Yes, close to delta neutral. Very important to be precise. I'm not saying they're wrong either. I'm comparing them to each other. They have identical prices in their options chains for each strike (at least on SPY), but their implied volatilities and delta numbers are not identical to each other.

Another question: I'm testing both ThinkorSwim and the OptionsHouse platforms. In the off hours, when the market isn't trading, the options of both platforms are identically priced with one another. However the deltas of identical positions are not the same. They're off by around .02 or .03. A...

I really like OptionHouse's commission structure but hate their risk analysis graph. If I end up trading with them I would use third party software for analysis. OptionHouse doesn't have a plugin available to stream their feeds. After experimenting with OptionsOracle, I see, as expected, the...

How would you compare Hoadley to OptionVue (if you've used OptionVue)? Is backtesting available with visual risk analysis graphs? Do you trade based on your Stockwatch feed rather than your individual broker's feed?

Thanks. It looks like they have good programs. However I'm not interested in bitcoin. If I can use it with SPY/IWM data that would be perfect for my uses.

Thanks for the link. Do you happen to know if it contains a visual risk analysis graph and if you can get SPY and IWM data?

Is there any free options software out there where you can test your strategies out on actual historical data with real past market prices and options greeks? I want to test my strategies against the worst case scenarios, like market crashes and relentless bull runs. TOS doesn't quite get it...

Have you ever been assigned on a short ITM option on SPY or IWM before expiration? What strategy were you trading and how did you handle it? In general terms, how risky are options on these 2 ETFs 2 to 3 weeks before expiration if your strategies involve spreads with short ITM options?

Here it is. This is info from a demo after the markets are closed. Not sure how helpful it will be:

I don't know what's wrong with it. I certainly won't use TOS until I'm satisfied by testing my positions on the platform for several months. After only testing both models for a few days I'm on the verge of completely abandoning any further testing of positions using their Individual Implied...

I don't know about other platforms but in TOS you can change the settings to use a "volatility smile approximation" instead of the default setting of "individual implied volatility" when looking at the greeks of the options you are trading. I currently have 2 demos running simultaneously, one...

edit on my previous post: The reason for the strange combinations given above is that closing out the trade in 2 three-leg custom spreads instead closing out the butterfly, then closing the call, then closing the debit spread individually, leaves less risk on the table should the market...

The examples I gave were actually examples of trades that would be used to close open positions. Sell 10 SPY 181 PUTS Buy 14 SPY 187 CALLS Sell 14 SPY 186 CALLS to close this position...