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Yes. Remember that the real purpose of a put is insurance on a long stock position. You buy 100 ABC at $100 and you simultaneously buy a 100 strike put for $1 (net debit $100) ABC falls to $90 so you lost $1000 on the stock but gained $1000 on the put minus the $100 debit (insurance premium)...

When you exercise a put you are putting 100 shares of the underlying to the counter-party at the strike price. Period. If you don't have shares in your account you have to borrow them (i.e. go short) to deliver to the counter-party. You'll end up short 100 shares.

When you buy a put you buy the right to "put" your stock to the counter-party of the contract. Say you own 1 put at 30 strike and 100 shares of the corresponding underlying. When you exercise at 20 you get to put the 100 shares to the counter-party at 30. As vanzandt pointed out if you don't...

Also Oanda doesn't use lots in their main platform. It's all unit based so you can put on a $0.10 trade if you want.

Oanda's trading app is actually pretty nice. Easy to use, easy on the eyes. Reasonable charting. It's Java-based so it runs on anything. They also have a mobile app for phones. Their app is lightweight as opposed to the apps from IB and TOS. Regarding horror stories, Oanda has not...

Is this only for Forex? Do you need MetaTrader for autotrading? That limits your choices right there. IB is out. Oanda has MetaTrader support in addition to their own API. They're also said to be "the best of the bucket shops".

Wow I wasn't expecting to start a flame war between hyper-sensitive millennials and 0.1 percenters. :D

It sounds like you don't need a full-blown client/server DB solution. I've been successfully using sqlite for years for this kind of data in C++ applications. A Java developer coworker uses H2 (the Java equivalent of sqlite) for the same purposes. Both sqlite and H2 are file-based relational...

For the record that was just a morbid joke.

Pff. I was being facetious of course.

Well you could borrow the money, live off it, then die of old age. Wouldn't care much at that point.

Are there any good discussions here or elsewhere about this kind of safe (relatively) dividend investing? I've been focusing on option spreads for so long I wouldn't know where to start.

Debt is a tool, plain and simple, just like a hammer. I like hammers and debt insofar as I can use them for something productive.

Fortunately he's not my financial advisor. We were shopping for one and sat down for a "free" 1 hour consult. My father would agree with your father. Mine was a CPA so I learned frugality and prudent money management at an early age.

Oops never mind. The multiplier on the ES contract is 50 also. I was wrong. It's 1:1

I admit I don't trade these. What's the 50 mean in the multiplier field then?

You could use 500 shares of SPY per contract. If you're long 1 ES, go short 500 SPY. Then again, why not just close the ES since it's mathematically the same as hedging it.

You have i the wrong way around. 1 ES option controls 50 ES futures contracts.

Maybe if I were trading long-only stock positions. What about layered broken wing butterflies? :D

I'll grind through the numbers and see. We were already in good shape with cash reserves when my mom died. The inheritance was about 1 year's pay so we really had too much cash reserves at that point. One of the big pre-retirement questions is are you going to stay in your house or move...