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Bizarre statement, and I have no idea where you're going with this. Of course you can live "without" oil and food... or at least you'd live differently. This is precisely why price discovery is important. If I see prices for oil going through the roof, then I will as a consumer drive/fly...

Does this scenario actually make sense to you? Your knowledge of the markets really seems very shallow. If I was the "lone oil producer", I'd be ECSTATIC with that scenario. I'd happily sell oil futures at $140 to the speculators. At the end of the month, I would then happily deliver on...

The purpose of equity trading isn't to "raise prices". If that was the goal, we should just all announce all NYSE stocks are trading at $1,000,000 tomorrow... and then we can all magically retire to the Bahamas and be done with it. The purpose of all these markets is price discovery...

Reality is always a good thing, for anyone. I'm not making *any* predictions about your ability to succeed or fail... just trying to lay the facts out there.

Very few people give out money-making advice just for fun... especially to potential competitors. I highly doubt you'll find someone here willing (or perhaps even able) to do so. And I, personally, am highly, highly skeptical that the vast, vast majority of "books" out there has any real...

"Volatility estimator" is the right term to be googling. There isn't a simple way to even define the term volatility, although usually we use it as being equivalent to the standard deviation for a log-normal distribution. What *you* mean by the term "volatility" is really up to you.

Oh but yes, R|Trader should be free for anyone supporting Rithmic.

Not hard. Find a big group of friends (perhaps from an online forum) and head to Vegas, each with $5k. Each person bets a number on the roulette table... one of you will hit the 35 to 1, and walk away with $175k. That person can then proceed to write a blog and multiple books about the...

No! You're totally missing the point. When the statistical edge is glaring, it doesn't require many samples to validate it. When the statistical edge is out of necessity minimal (and has to be for a low-delta, low-probability spread), then it requires MANY samples. If I'm contemplating...

Let's say we have God-like powers, and we know some option spread (I'll call it the Copper Beaver) is profitable exactly 90% of the time, and a loser 10% of the time. And of course, the Copper Beaver is usually priced correctly. (This is just going to be a simplistic model... we're not even...

How would you calculate the "expected value fairly easily"? Price movements every day are just outputs from a random variable with a distribution that we can only observe, not actually know. Let's go with you and sle's theory, and run backtests and came up with the conclusion that you...

Sounds like the farmers (and onion consumers) are exposed to a huge amount of financial risk because of the lack of speculators. Onion prices moved up 300%, and then moved down 75%, in two years!? That's even more volatile/crazy than silver. That'd be equivalent to crude moving up to $300...

I don't want to beat this topic into the ground... but when you talk about "understanding the risk", my opinion is how to determine whether you really *do* understand the risk. How do you measure your own level of knowledge, and just as importantly, ability to execute correctly? It's gotta be...

How about... it's easy to cheat yourself into thinking your making money with options, because they aren't 50/50 trades the way directional trades are. Scalpers have thousands of trades and track win %, r/r, edge per trade, etc. Easy to understand the odds in those trades (roughly 50-50)...

Bought them as a currency hedge for broader portfolio. Don't usually trade them.

I have a question about this, re: OTC deals for individuals. I'm told by several OTC brokers I've spoken to that there's a regulatory requirement, that I need $10mm in AUM before I can trade OTC and clear at CME/ICE (via clearport, etc). Is that not the case in the equity world?

Looks like the futures settle at 3 PM EST. So, I'm going to assume options are settled at the same time.

Does anyone know when/how DX options on futures settle? The ICE website is, as usual, sparse on details. I have some long 75 calls expiring today... and it looks like it *might* get there. https://www.theice.com/productguide/ProductDetails.shtml?specId=1216

Here's the ruling you referred to: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-08-05.pdf Note that futures contracts are not securities, and the other taxation considerations you mentioned already don't apply. And in this context, I'm not looking for a tax deduction in the taxed account.... Just...

If it's a wash sale, and you're trading with yourself, thats definitely an issue. But that's why I'm asking here.... Anyone think it's a legal issue otherwise? I can't think of a reason why it'd be if we just joined a liquid market and traded with others. As far as spread and commissions...