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Never never never pull out your 401K money and pay the penalty. If you change jobs you can roll the 401K into a self-directed IRA.

My June ICs are safe barring a nuclear war. The July NDX short put at 2725 just exceeded my 20 delta threshold intraday. So I wait and try to roll down the put side on Monday. July RUT doesn't require any action yet.

The profit from shorting options is always a short term cap gain no matter how long you hold it. IRS Publication 550 is your friend.

The stop loss distance is unimportant. Stop losses should only be based on technical support levels. They simply are what they are. Now, how much you lose when the stop is hit is important. That's position sizing; it's way more important than "how many pips".

There are other factors affecting early exercise of puts calls. Dividends and interest rate changes come to mind.

Haha, apologies to OP. I wasn't at my programming PC when I wrote that. I implemented it in C++ in a similar fashion to the code snippet posted earlier. You try different IV values until the calculated option price is close to the market price. You can do it slowly with a linear search or...

It's just algebra. Rearrange the forumula so that volatility is on the left and plug in the other values. If you know the option price, days to expiry, etc you can solve for IV with a plug and chug. If you're hard up you can always just repeatedly plug in different volatility values until...

The guys I referred to had already negotiated lower commissions that were within the realm of reason. I suspect TOS is like Subway: no one pays full price, there's always a discount coupon available.

For option trading TOS is a superior platform to IB. That's what you're paying for in higher commissions. Trade entry and analysis features (such as such as risk graphs) in TOS are convenient and intuitive. IB's feature set is very basic in this regard. I know option traders who won't...

Works fine here.

Depends on how large the position is. If you sell 1 10 strike put contract for $.50 and the stock goes to 0 you lose 10*100-0.50. If you buy 100 shares of stock at 10 and it goes to 0 you lose 10*100. Owning stock is worse from a risk perspective. To sell puts you only need to put up...

You're too late. Back before TOS was gobbled up you could negotiate the commissions down some, though not as low as IB. Now they're owned by a big company and don't have to negotiate.

Nah. At least for naked puts it's no more a baller than one who buys stock. In fact it's less risk.

I have both a cash and IRA account at IB. A few years ago I set up a "friends and family" manager account to control them both. It works pretty well. You can control both accounts in addition to trading in the management account itself. It's also more cost efficient since you can do all...

On Gmail I use 2 factor authentication and on my trading accounts I use the security device. Even if the password were cracked they'd still need the other mechanism to get in.

Well *my* universe will end sometime within the next 50 years probably. But I use minimum 12 characters, mixed upper/lower case, digits and symbols. And yes, I use all 3 of those character types in every password I create. With current technology it would theoretically take millions of...

The assertion that half the accounts are fake is hardly surprising. The real surprise is it's only half.

There, fixed that fer ya.

I keep my trading credentials in a "safe" place, also I made sure my wife knows how to log in "just in case". As individuals we live day to day assuming we'll wake up and be there tomorrow. But you can't always count on that. My passwords are sufficiently long that no amount of password...

Not much to post since this sideways price action started. Every day that passes with the market generally going nowhere decreases my risk. I'm a little nervous about a sudden downside move so I may put on a hedge in that direction. Just in case.