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Well, I understand that one of the tricks the HFT boys use is to spot a price change in the underlying and immediately buy calls or puts (withing a ms or two) before the MMs have a chance to update their quotes. I'm still trying to figure out the social benefits of this. :p Needless to...

Those equity curves you posted earlier looked way too good to be true. Regardless, good luck on your patched up code. It will be interesting to see the results.

Of course it's an impeachable offense. But we don't impeach Presidents over starting a war without a proper Congressional declaration. We impeach them for lying about blow jobs.

I trade for the most obvious reason. In the (sometimes vain) hope of making money. After saving the maximum allowed in my IRAs and 401ks for 30 years and having hardly anything to show for it I've realized that "investing" is for suckers.

Given that the only parameter that has changed is time it is obvious that the gain in the short put is solely due to time decay. Of course you give a fairly artificial example -- the stock dropped down on bad news and its implied volatility went up, and then months later the stock hasn't moved...

Um, no, it's a joke.

Well VIX options are tricky things. They aren't priced on the basis of the spot VIX. Instead they are priced on the basis of the VIX future with the same expiration as the option. The futures in turn aren't pegged to the spot VIX (except very near expiration), they are set at the market's...

Shorting VXX after a big spike in volatility (spot VIX to 40 or so) is pretty much a sure thing. Of course those events are pretty are. As far as going long on volatility, I'd just as soon buy puts on SPX as calls on VIX.

Who was dumb enough to believe the Bush administration's fabrications? Hillary Clinton. Who wasn't? Republican Ron Paul. BTW, Obama has had over two years to end the wars, and all he has done is get us into a new one. They are the Obama wars now.

My brother's wife used to teach in a heavily Hispanic school district in Texas. She told me that more than half the children were classified as "special needs" (you know, the euphemism for "retarded"). I said that either a lot of those kids were misclassified or else we had better start a...

I don't use TOS but any option broker will let you create a limit order, whether you're buying a single option or a spread. Most of the time using a market order for options is a very bad idea. When you do the market makers raise a glass and cheer, another damn fool has entered the arena.

For short term trades I question the use of vertical spreads. Vertical spreads work best when you plan you hold your position for a significant fraction of the lifetime of the options, so the short side has a chance to undergo time decay. A spread can lower your delta to an annoying degree if...

Now there's as fine a set of quotes as any I've seen.

Correct. Ron Paul is not enamored of our entitlement programs but he realizes that no major changes can be made without a widespread consensus. And unlike other Republicans, he realizes that is is crazy to talk about cutting Social Security or Medicare while we are wasting hundreds of billions...

While many blacks quite rightly resent the massive influx of illegal aliens the Congressional Black Caucus is all in favor of illegal alien amnesty, right along with the white (and of course, the Hispanic) Democratic congressmen. So, you are right -- you don't have a voice in the immigration...

But were the poor paying for those programs? Nope. So while tax cuts to the rich may not be wise policy, your assumption that the money that the government was taking from the rich and giving to the poor "really" belongs to the poor is not one shared by people with a normal sense of ethics.

The Democrats all favor discrimination against whites, known under various euphemisms as affirmative action or set asides. So who are the real racists? The Republicans are too keen on tax cuts for rich people that they inevitably pay for with more debt (since they never cut spending). And...

Well, at least that's more promising than starting an option MM operation with $1 million.

Because it's overcast and rainy so much of the time.

Okay, I was assuming we're not trading OTC penny stocks.