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Joe, I don't really do TA or charting. Do they have accurate historical options data available? If so can I get it during their free trial?

Wish I had seen your earlier posts. That means thinkBack itself is pretty useless since it is based on the bad data. Edit: They DO fill in from previous days on non-trading days, which I was aware of and my program depends on. It's "free" (except for the hours spent downloading by...

I've been downloading historical options data from TOS thinkBack. First of all it's tedious, you have to download one day at a time. Then, when running my backtest I was getting some strange results. It turns out there are quite a few errors in the data. For example in the SPY: A few days...

Update on the Modified Martingale. Just ran my test on 2011 YTD. A single unit would be down .62 points but the MM is actually up 1.02. If I had just bet 1.4 units it would be down .87.

Wait for the margin call?

I added the Modified Martingale to the strategy I am testing.This is the one that only goes to a max of two units after two losses, and back to one after two wins. It consistently adds about 40% to the results. It seems like it works as long as your strategy wins in the long run. But then if you...

(In case anyone is still reading this thread.) I fracked up on checking the weeklys (who knew there was a company named SPX Corp and you need a ^on Yahoo?). Anyway the weekly results for the real index are even worse and for the 2001 to present about the same as the total history - about...

So are you saying he faked his SPX spread results? I got his spreadsheet but I haven't gone back to check to results.

I don't doubt your stats and you have the results to back them up. I was just checking to see if there might be the same "edge' in trading weeklys. Looks to be not as good as the monthlys.

It was 1985 to present. I went back and just used 2001 to present and it was still about 50/50 using close-to-close (289 up/240 down, 3 no change). Edit: It's about 55%/45%, just eyeballing it seemed more like 50/50.

Just for curiosity I downloaded the weekly data from Yahoo on SPX starting in 1985. It is just about 50/50 up weeks/down weeks. It's not exactly settlement to settlement but probably close enough.

So I went into thinkBack to test this out. I just happened to pick last July. The first week I tried the SPX was at 1027 on July 1 so I went out to 1075/975. Guess what? A week later it had just 50 points to 1077 on July 8. Luckily it was close enough to the strike to still make a profit...

How about skewing the strikes instead of going equidistant plus and minus?

Would that rhyme with Larry's Lips or Perry's Pips or something? If so he has discovered weeklys and doing basically the same thing claims he will never lose again.

So how is the client performing on these?

One of the strategies usually mentioned with monthly diagonals or calendars is that you can buy a few months out and roll the shorts several times to pay for the long legs. There should be the same opportunity here with the weeklys and monthly (and/or quarterly) combinations.

Hasn't that always been the reasoning behind calendars, diagonals, double diags, etc? With weeklys you just get faster theta. As the Greek jockeys always like to mention more gamma exposure, too.

AFAIK most week there won't be anything expiring two weeks out. You have to go with the next monthly expiration, or quarterly if it's closer. This month the quarterly just happens to expire about a week after the Mar4. I am having trouble understanding what Atticus means by selling the...

They should at least get the terminology right. Bandwidth is a data rate. They are imposing a usage cap.

I went into TOS thinkBack and ran "weekly" short strangles for 2008 on IWM. I just picked whatever was first OTM (whatever TOS selected as ATM). I opened a position on Friday and closed it on the next Friday, and opened a new one wherever the market happened to be. No adjustment, just take the...