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On the planet Zarkon an Iron Condor has 13.71 legs.

TOS standard rates are outrageously expensive at 9.95 + 1.50 per contract (I think it used to be .75 before TD Ameritrade). I have a "special discount" of 1.50 per contract with no ticket fee. Since I got back into this and started paper trading about a month ago I am up over $5,000 with over...

I'm talking about ticket charges. Like I think Schwab charges 8.95 ticket charge plus .75 per option contract. Let's say you buy back 10 calls, it would be 8.95 + 7.50. Then you sell 10 farther out it would also be 8.95 + 7.50. If you did it as a spread it would be 8.95 + 15.00 (two legs=20...

You should be able to only pay one ticket charge for rolling if you do it as a calendar or diagonal, e.g. buy the near call, sell the far as a single transaction. Of course you would need to have the appropriate option trading level with your broker.

I ran Thinkorswims expiration steps and it showed a pretty wide profit zone for APR5. Don't recall if i ran the vol steps. IIRC the short vols were in the 60s yesterday and the 30s this morning. I'm thinking trailing stops on each strangle might have worked out better. By the time I woke up all...

I tried a double diagonal on AMZN late yesterday: +MAY 170 Put -2.80 -APR5 175 Put +2.79 -APR5 185 Call +4.45 +MAY 190 Call -3.85 "Bought" for .59 credit. When I woke up and started looking at the screen it was zooming up, so I bought the APR5 shorts for 6.87 (.37 profit). Let the...

No reason to disregard, it's just different. I would be interested to see how yours performs. Maybe start a thread in Journals if you want to spend the effort.

Just to note the differences with the OP, he said to use 3:1 ratio of SPX:VIX, and to buy VIX 40 calls. Don't know how VIX correlate with VXX, but that might pu the VXX calls out at 45 or higher (VXX=23.78, VIX=15.62). Even the 40 VXX calls are only .09 now.

I've thought about this but never tested it. As you say you would need to exit both at or near the same time. The market could tank and the VIX would go up, then the market stabilizes lower and the VIX might go down. Can you test it for the little dip we had a couple of months ago that wiped...

For at or near the money I think you should always be able to sell.

You could do a synthetic short, buy a put and sell a call, theoretically for the same price as the option. That is, if the option is supposed to be worth $10+time value, you should be able to do the synthetic for the same credit. Edit: This is a reply to rew's comment.

Selling the options should be a bit better than exercising and selling the stock. The options will have $10 of intrinsic value, plus whatever time value is left. That's what the .40 was when the call was out of the money. There is a market maker there to buy the option. If he can't unload it...

Bull Call Spread. Oops, you edited.

Any other stocks like GOOG or AAPL announcing next week? I made some paper $$$ (the TOS paperMoney kind, not the worthless Ben Bernank kind) in the past two weeks on GOOG and AAPL. (Ya, I know, I will check for myself, just thought I'd ask here.)

Exactly, what's the inflation-adjusted valued of that $114,000?

That's the point I was trying to get across in my post the included the same Wiki page that Howard repeated. Even well known authors don't agree. The CBOE, which might be considered "the industry" seems to confirm that it's long because it's a synthetic form of the long all-put or all-call...

LOL, I wonder if your current broker is Schwab, who just announced a merger with OX. I went to the OX website and they are a bit light on details. I finally found that they do trade options on futures by looking at their commission page which was also not obvious. It's under the "About Us"...

Don't forget the expense of the rule of contract law and other minor stuff like that.

From the Wiki page: So I went to Natenberg and he defines it as short. Guy Cohen defines it as long. I recall seeing a post by atticus (or maybe riskarb, I've been looking at his old journals) where he talks about being "long the fly" and I think I figured out he was talking the credit...

For one thing the OP is full of typos - two puts instead of calls, 930/920 reversed. As far why it's "long", probably because it has the same P/L and the long put or call condor.