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From what I've seen, IB does its best to ensure it's customers get the best execution on the street. Your trade is probably just an exception.

You should be happy, since you are getting the best execution on the street. IB provides the most price improvements of all brokers out there.

I am really starting to think that CBOE does not know it's ass from it's elbow and that these futures will go the same way as the other "wounderful" inventions such as listed credit products for very dumb reasons. If they are hoping to win liquidity from OTC, they better be able to get MMs to...

In a sense, yes. In my cross-asset strategies, I am usually happy to diversify and harvest idiosyncratic risk premium, while hedging away the systematic risk component. However, an extreme idiosyncratic risk event would hurt and one can think of this as extreme break-down of correlation. The...

Because you can be short gamma and still be net long risk premium. You can have ratio spreads and be long gamma etc. Greeks define your instantaneous risk and also explain your instantaneous P&L. This is especially important if you are running a large options book where there are various risks...

Dispersion is still pretty popular, though marginally less so since 2008. However, most of my strategies have nothing to do with dispersion, not even in "quasi" form - i am playing various intra- and cross-asset risk prema, e.g. I can be putting on relative skew trades or relative term...

Obviously, it does not work all the time, but I have multiple strategies running at the same time, so I have the benefit of diversification. In anything, in a crisis I usually make money - 2011 was my best year, followed closely by 2008. I can't get into specifics, but the whole idea is to...

Truth is, I do trade every style (have some delta strategies too), but don't really do proper "AAPL will go up tomorrow" kind of trading. However, in most cases I like being balanced risk premium - if I am collecting theta some place, I want to buy some protection elsewhere.

In general, you should always assume that your worst draw-down is still ahead of you and plan accordingly. If you have a reasonable back-test or a long enough real-life track record, you can/should think of some sort of MC re-sampling to estimate what is the worst case draw-down - while it will...

Sell a tiny, drive a Lamborghini!(c) In reality, you most probably do not want to buy these (waste of money) and most probably do not want to sell them (unless it's an airport trade). Especially the ones in index, hedgies have a tendency of selling really short-dated teenies and if you win...

Does trading VIX options count as being "underlying directional trader"?

The absolute amount does not matter, it's the relative cost of hedging that might add up.

Listed are super-liquid, i will look up volumes tomorrow but it's something like twice the ADV of S&P and SPY combined. An interesting fact is that the options are more liquid then the underlying itself (the futures), because of the retail participation in the options market.

Think of another interesting factor while being long volatility - you are short convexity on your income, unless you are all in the upper bracket. For example, imagine that you are long gamma and lose money 3 years out of 4, but in the 4th year your end up making 100% on your capital. For...

Simply being short gamma or short skew is a reasonable strategy overall, except an institutional trader would have been fired a few times over the last 20 years. Which is why selling vol is still a winning trade :)

Mea culpa, you are totally right.

I used to use Eclipse, but have switched to RStudio about a year ago - the server-based version makes it worth while and, on average, you don't really need step-wise debugger in R. Also, RStudio is a hybrid development/analysis environment - there are table viewers, integrated doc writers etc. I...

These are fungible underlyings, so you can trade a SPY or SPX option and hedge it with ES futures. Plus, an options trader that does not delta hedge is still an options trader, the key difference is that one is trading volatility and the other is trading terminal distribution (there are good...

I second that - I have not seen any significant (arbable) differences between SPY, SPX and ES ever. There are some financing differences and dividend treatment is a touch different, but all of that is taken into account, all three are super-liquid. If there is any sort of "arb" (at least in...

By extension, everything in life is uncertain to a varying degree and everything in life is usually short carry (you have to pay to eat, last time I checked). So, using your definition, everything is a gamble. Does "knowing" that your current activity is a gamble help you at all? Probably not.