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Everything that you say may be totally true but extensive programming and extensive development skills aren't usually within the purview of most of the retail world which has not spent their professional life in the pits, at prop desks or in related industry positions. Ergo, we end up doing...

Agreed. I don't buy into a fixed number such as 30% but with many strategies there's a point after which adjustments aren't feasible even if you want to hang in there.

+1 for that conclusion. I believe that it's possible to find set ups where there's a statistical edge but as you noted, nothing worthwhile. Retail (us) can't find enough of them and in sufficient size to get anywhere. I'd also add to your list: appropriate strategy selection for the...

Au contraire mon ami. I think that your hard-to-borrow arb story is very co, co, coh, coheh. cohare, coheer, cohairant ! :) My borrowing pound of flesh last month was just short of $500. And I did that voluntarily :eek:

I have done detailed probability analysis of statistics presented on ET and I have determined that 88.2% of them are correct and the other 23.1% of them are made up.

I have a hard time believing that the number of quotes is a function of the commissions I pay. Having generated over $22 grand in commissions last year, I can't believe I'd be allowed only 100 quotes... and for the first 1/4 I'm ahead of last year's pace. That makes no sense. But who knows...

PS The banks are down moderately this AM. Check out straddles on GS, MET, NTRS, WFC, JPM, MET, USB, BCS. The lower priced stocks will probably give you more bang for the buck. Compare today's quotes to Friday's close. It won't be exact but you don't need precision to observe.

Everyone is making this really complex. All the info you need will be posted at the CBOE web site (terms of merger and contract adjustment details).

Straddles were a great idea last year when the financials were dropping by the minute. You overpaid for them (high IV) and got rewarded big time because the drops were massive. You can judge for yourself whether now is a good time to do it by selecting a basket of active financials...

Thanks to all for their replies. Some add'l questions... IB states that there is a 100 quote limit for their platform. In reality, it allows for more but let's stick with their stated max of 100. They also indicate that each DDE request from Excel counts as a quote. So if the limit is...

Moving from Chicago to Norway? There goes all that vote early and vote often fun!

You're not going to miss the sardines??

Does anyone know of any 3rd party software that will enable me to use Excel with the IB platform? I am currently using IB's DDE connection and would like something else. TIA

I had similar problems with IB when I was using a puter with 1 MB of memory. The more web sites I went to and applications opened during the day, the slower it got. Eventually it would lock up and only a hard boot would get me back up. I also found that upgrades often caused new problems...

>> In my experience, adjustments rarely worked. If i simply exited the losing trade and admitted that my position was wrong, I would have saved a bundle. << If your experience had been that adjustments worked most of the time for you, your post would have been the exact opposite of what you...

Another problem that I noticed is your statement: "An example would be buying a ATM 10 call and selling two 15 calls at a small credit when prices are around 10." There's a trade off b/t IV and time. The farther out you go timewise, the lower the IV needs to be in order to obtain a cost...

Yep, I thot of that but it doesn't make life easier because then I need to split the quotes in half and have two Excel spreadsheets open, each linked to the respective accounts. It could/would work but I'd feel like the dancing chicken in the frying pan on the grill :) Spin

First off, a small detail. In your example, you're comparing an ATM call ratio write with a 5 pt call ITM ratio. The results of each are very different. I'm not going to try to convince you that you should be comfortable with being naked. It seems like it's driving your thought process...

Over the years there's been chatter here from peeps looking for a web site that offered skew screening. As far as I know, the general consensus was that it was only available from a data service (subscription fee). When I actively traded them, I'd DL the weekly McMillan IV numbers and...

If we're still talking about horizontal skew, it's something that you want to try to take advantage of if you believe that it's going to change. On its own, I'm not sure that it's an indicator of anything.