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The implied volatility is a lot lower than four months ago. One of the reason it's not a very good time to sell options. Without a good sense on volatility, one should only trade the underlying.

Good points. My rule of selling naked options is annual return on equity no more than 20%. Try to do more than that will wipe you out someday. If I am still in the market 5 years from now, I may try 30% return. It's a big money play.

That is my experience too. I heard a lot people complaining about fills. I use I.B. and the fills are pretty quick.

Yes you can. Selling naked puts has the same risk characteristic as selling covered calls, with limited upward profit and max down risk of the underlying to zero.

Just checked quote FVX JUL 35 P = 8.50 x 9.70 FVX = 25.57 Look reasonable to me. Where is this FVX JUN 40 P? Should expired. Am I missing something here?

Not managing $10M but buying power. The equity may be less than $1M.

They might work 80 hours or more a week to get 55 - 60K. On a hourly basis it's not that high. Maybe that's a reason to switch to trading. 80 hours a week hard work will have a good learning curve towards trading skills but it's way more riskier than the back office position.

Agree! Software engineers will still have their jobs but their pay will be more in line with engineers in other fields.

Thanks for the great story of your best friend. America will stay in top of the world if we have more people like him. What can be better than being independent to celebrate the INDEPENDENCE DAY. Wish him luck.

You can buy puts in your IB IRA if you are bearish. Not the front month contracts that time decay can really hurts.

People use the term "manufacture deflation". That sector are sure in deflation. Price in some service sector are down too. Hope they don't spread out.

Absolutly. It's all about position size, whether selling options or trading the underlying. People selling options blew out because they sold too many contracts than their capital allowed, not because they were short gamma. Selling options is for big money play. If your account is less than...

Is that about deflation? I can see both equities and gold go down under that environment.

Like everyone else, investor will make mistake and have to cut loss. It's good that you have not made mistake so far. But even Warren Buffett made mistake. If I were you I would be more careful. I know a guy made money for two years and lost all in one mistake. Good luck!

The max of VIX was like 173 in Black Monday. I try to attach a chart.

The ISE said they would enter the index options business soon. With all these exclusive licensing arrangements, it'll be pretty hard for them. I wonder are there indices that are widely followed but not having exclusive licensing arrangements?

How about OEX? Is that also a CBOE exclusive?

Talking about option biz at PHLX, I wonder why their foreign exchange options, like XEU, have extremely narrow bid/ask spreads, but for some reason (that I am still try to figure out), their volume and O.I. are very low. Should it be either low volume/wide spread or high volume/narrow spread...

Kiyosaki's books are popular books because their appealing to average readers. I read one his book and found nothing new to me. It repeated the same idea again and again. But I think calling them Snake oil you miss the point. To many readers it is still very educational.

Interesting comments. The theory of probability in a large part grew out of the need of gambling in middle of the seventeenth century. Trading option is very risky, but that's where potential reward is. There's no free lunch. The key is to take CALCULATED risk, and you need math to do that.