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    Ivx, Teva

    IIRC, the Sears/K-Mart merger had a similar arrangement: S shareholders could choose to get either $50 or stock in the combined company, but only 55% could get stock. The stock alternative turned out to be the better one, and was more than fully subscribed, and the day after the merger was...
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    Bloomberg vs SFCC

    Have been following the SFCC saga since Bloomberg started their series of negative articles. It's pretty amazing how much they spin things. Every time SFCC comes out with a positive press release, it's spun into something negative by Bloomberg. When innocuous things happen such as building...
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    Why is there no discussion of Schwab or Fidelity

    Schwab is on a par with Ameritrade, I'd say - reasonable for someone who trades a couple times a week and isn't really concerned about fill quality, but not for someone who trades volume or as his or her primary job. Orders tend to get routed to exchanges that they prefer, which may or may...
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    where to get free option charts

    If your broker's platform doesn't have option charts, you can get basic charts for free at marketwatch.com. Their charts only show sales, not bid/ask, so with low-volume options with large spreads, the charts may not be terribly useful for analysis...
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    Pfizer + 2.5, %10, in Pre Market

    From the WSJ: Traders Get 11th-Hour Pfizer Move Traders who like to check out early on Friday might want to think twice about it -- at least during option's expiration week. Those who were around to react to late breaking news that a U.S. court ruled in favor of Pfizer Inc. in its...
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    greek denoting change in IV?

    Is there a greek that denotes the expected change in IV as the underlying moves? For instance, SFCC is going up today, so the IV is going down. The Jan 12.5 call, which ostensibly has a delta of .70, is moving up much more slowly, as if the delta were more like .33. Just curious if there's a...
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    Unexpected price improvement feature

    If you sell an option at market, you can actually receive less than $.05. I sold some APPX Dec 40 calls this morning and got $.02 for them. Spread at the time was .00x.10. Better than nothing, I guess, but I was surprised the minimum wasn't .05.
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    Expirationless options

    It'd also be interesting to see how the no-expire options morph as corporate actions pile up during the lifetime of the option. Imagine the chain for an option in T purchased 25 years ago...
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    Expirationless options

    You make it really expensive. In a paper on that web site, http://www.xpotrade.com/pdf/LEAPSvsXPOs.pdf , they give an example in which a slightly ITM no-expire option on a stock with 27.7% volatility costs around 50% of the price of the underlying. Looking at the LEAPs for a stock that has...
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    IB TWS Login becoming VERY S-L-O-W!

    How many symbols do you have? Back when market data was available on port 4001, my TWS with 12 tabbed pages, each with a good number of symbols, would take over a minute to login. Now that market data is only available on port 4000, which my firewall blocks, it only takes around 15 seconds for...
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    Windows XP Pro Genuine Verification

    Out of curiosity, what type of XP is it? Retail, OEM, volume, pirate?
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    Fat Finger Mistake Costs Firm 225MM

    From the WSJ: TOKYO -- As Mizuho Securities Co. settled its massive botched trade yesterday, several big brokerage houses such as UBS Securities, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., as well as thousands of individual investors, walked away with handsome profits. The...
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    HANS - Cramer nailed this one.

    OK. Where would one go to buy HANS options?
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    SEC Fees?

    The sad thing is, the SEC fee gets dumped into the Treasury, just like any other tax, and the SEC's funding is only around half of the amount generated by the fee.
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    SEC Fees?

    http://traderstatus.com/secfeerates.htm has the same list that Szeven posted. It also has links to the SEC site where the Fee Rate Advisories are posted.
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    Are settlement rules different for daytraders?

    There's day-trading and there's pattern day-trading. You can day-trade with a cash account or a $2000 margin account. A margin account will give you 2:1 (or better) buying power. If you have > $25K, you can elect to be a pattern day-trader. If you day-trade more than 3 times in a rolling...
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    Paper trading now at IB.

    Do you have to logout out of your real account to use the paper trading account, or can you have two TWS's running simultaneously?
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    options backdating

    From http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113167728332394467.html?mod=yahoo_hs&ru=yahoo (which should be readable by anybody for a little while), "Authorities Probe Improper Backdating of Options":
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    HANS - Cramer nailed this one.

    Like many of Cramer's picks, HANS isn't optionable.
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    CSCOs news...

    It looks like it dropped during the CC. Was the drop triggered by something Chambers said at around 17:21?
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