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You hold an opinion my friend. Millions of the rest of us hold an opposite opinion. I at least have based my opinion on a pretty deep dive into the facts and a broad background in the subject. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you have as well. I don't think what you believe...

The price of options is based on the volatility of the underlying. If an insider from a firm conveys non-public information on an event that will impact that volatility, and hence the options price, and you trade on it, then you're in pretty straightforward violation of insider trading laws. And...

He types on the internet.....

Thanks. Look forward to you offering futures options spreads!

Who are you introducing to?

Looks like the principles, Ryan Hansen and Richard Tomsic are Gain Capital alumni. Also looks like they aren't actually up and running yet, hopefully, because if they are they're CFTC status isn't up to date.

If you want to claim to "beat Buffet" you need to show that you achieved a higher return with a lower risk, not simply that you had higher returns. Any jackass can throw together an options "strategy" that will give a higher return than Buffet, that's absolutely meaningless. I'd recommend the OP...

An edit to the edit, after the Volker Rule investment banks aren't allowed to prop trade, so you won't get hired as a prop trader by an investment bank. You may take some directional bets when hedging a bespoke product you produce for a client or when market making, but you're certainly not...

I think the word "trader" means a lot of different things to different people, so while you're asking what you think is a straightforward question you'll get a lot of different answers because the people answering are all thinking of a different position. For example, to be specific hedge funds...

ES options are exercised into ES futures, they are not cash settled (wish they were!). SPX options are cash settled. Some brokers charge for exercise and some don't. OptionsXpress doesn't charge if you hold ES or SPX into expiration ITM. Of course with the ES options you end up with an ES...

It's interesting that in a thread about the absurdity of IB's price caps the best the IB rep can do is take issue (incorrectly no less) with someone who brought up their equally absurd unannounced freeze in IRA futures trading. I don't understand what it is with this company, they pay someone to...

And they make that money regardless of how the economy is doing, unlike the highly cyclical auto industry.

Thanks for the insight!

I am curious if in your experience floor brokers can add value in complex order book orders like simple vertical spreads? For SPX the cob bid/ask is always much better than the synthetic you'd get by legging in the underlying options at their mids. I'm curious if a floor broker can find a match...

The frustrating part is that if indeed it went to a broker, they never actually executed. They would base it on order size, so for example today every order for 10 contracts or more wouldn't appear on the exchange for sometimes several minutes. If I broke it into two 5 contract orders, they'd...

This happened all the time with SPX options with me, they told me that either they're "holding it" until they decide it's "marketable" or that their broker is "marketing" it. Apparently they get to decide if they want to send your order to the exchange or not on their whim. Yet another reason...

That's true if you're talking about ES futures. The OP's question was about options. If you have options on an ES future you take delivery of the future if you're in the money on expiration. If you had a 5 point vertical spread that required $500 in margin, you'd need around $2,600 to take...

As long as there isn't too much skew, you the delta of the currency options are a at least a first order approximation of the percentage chance that the security will trade above/below the strike price on the day the option expires. Alternately looking at the mid on binary options, if you can...

The bias up hits you no matter what, it's there every minute the market trades, you can just minimize it by not being in the market all the time. The fact that there's limited downside and virtually unlimited upside also impacts you regardless of timeframe. Just pointing out things to look at...

SPX options are 1256 contracts so the tax is 60/40 same as ES. SPY obviously are not.