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When I taught a hardware repair class at an IRS campus in Ohio around 1990, my students proudly showed me their latest technological marvel: a bank of modems - a whole dozen of them! - that had recently been set up for their most recent brilliant invention, electronic filing. These were large...

Yeah, I got that. So what? It makes zero difference. They have the power to do it and the popular mandate; in short, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, and it doesn't affect anything materially. Some people get nervous when a cop car rolls down the block, and those are the ones that...

Getting caught up in what? Banks have been reporting $10k+ (or any they deem "suspicious") transactions to the IRS for a long time now. Yes, it's moronic and outrageous. No, it's not going to have black helicopters landing on your lawn or result in you being smacked around under bright lights...

I'm not aware of any screener that would scan for term structure; if you had an options data feed (and I don't know of any free ones, or cheap ones that are any good), it wouldn't be that hard to code one up, though. The classic way to profit from increasing IV would be debit spreads - but IV...

@zdreg's answer, and people asking for an explanation of what a gamma squeeze is. Note that I'm explicitly not agreeing or disagreeing with that being the actual cause of the volume in weeklies - I can think of several reasons for it, but I don't know which one (or what mix of those) applies...

I'm afraid that's incorrect; 1973 was when the CBOE started to provide exchange-traded options for the US market. Before that - since shortly after the opening of the NYSE in 1791 - they were traded "over the counter", i.e., by individual brokers matching buyers and sellers (and later, by the...

I edited an international publication (Linux Gazette) for years, so I have all kinds of Aussie, Kiwi, Hindi, Queens' English, etc. bits rattling around in my head, and they can surface at unpredictable times. Read what I write at your own risk; it's guaranteed to mess with your noggin sooner or...

There are several professionals here who are certainly more knowledgeable than me, and who'd be much better suited to exploring that question. But I'll note that the oldest book we have on trading, de la Vega's "Confusion de Confusiones" written in 1688 - really the very beginnings of the market...

When r/wallstreetbets retards retail traders load up on short-term calls, the MMs who are selling all this volume have to hedge it by buying a bunch of shares. But doing that drives up the price of the underlying - which makes their inventory of short calls even more -delta, so they have to...

I do know one guy - a retired trader/MM who can put words together pretty well - who has written a book; I reviewed it for him. The problem is, he keeps fiddling with the damn thing because it's "not perfect", and, well, putting something that's not perfect out into the market is something he's...

That last is a useful addition - thanks! I knew it was a rough approx, and it makes sense that things go non-linear as vol gets high. I've seen all sorts of fiddle factors here... e.g., TastyTrade says it's the ATM straddle x 0.85. But based on what I've seen over time, the actual move (in...

You'd also need to multiply the above by the stock price - i.e., S x σ x sqrt(t/365) - so for 15 days and an IV of 15% in SPY, you're looking at 435 x 0.15 x sqrt(15/365), or ~12.35. You can also find it on the option chain in your trading software, or just price the ATM straddle for that tenor...

Not exactly. :) I assume you wanted both of these to be Oct 29, right? VIX is a 30-day moving average, so it's not very useful here. The expected move for that tenor in SPY is 16.84%/12.19; I'd say you're better off using that, maybe even figure out the 2SD move and run another pair of curves...

[sigh] Awesome. It's so trivial that anyone can do it, just by reading some newspapers. Go forth and show us all how it's done.

This is the sort of thing I mean when I say "basic knowledge"; the kind of thing that can be looked up, because it's not specific to the practice of trading. Don't get me wrong - it's good, I'm glad that you got to learn something new as a result of seeing it - but... you should at least go...

"Trading is easy. It’s like riding a bike – except the bike is on fire, you’re on fire, everything is on fire, and you’re in hell." -- Localized version of popular meme

True enough - if you have any degree of success in predicting which way the frog is going to jump, no complexity is needed. But for those of us who don't have that magic touch, well... vol does offer a fair degree of mean reversion, but it takes a lot more than a binary guess to trade it well...

This is what I assumed right from the start, and haven't seen anything to even hint otherwise since then. Unpacking that brevity and all its implications has been one hell of an education (one in which "googling" is rarely of much help)... and I don't know that it could be done any other way...

As far as I understand it - and this is supported by very similar terms being used about crypto - it means "clueless morons will lose their money even faster if they trade these products".

Yeah, you're being "ganged up on." In fact, you're being oppressed and observing the violence inherent in the system. Pretty sure there was a movie about it. Or could be you just made a nonsense comment intended to puff yourself up, achieved the opposite effect, and are now trying to cover up...