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Correct. As a general rule, it's a wash. Because of the pending dividend, you'll get a little more for the put sold and pay a little more for the put bot. With near term options, despite common logic, sometimes you'll see the OTM strike go up more than the other, making the net spread...

There's something very wrong with this picture. You lost 27% in one day and you work full time as IT consultant, travel M-Th and juggle the investment? Look, I'm sympathetic to your situation but you have no business selling premium and doing the circus act (juggling). Your new model won't...

Option P&L is a moving target. Premium changes daily due to time decay, change in underlying, change in implied volatility. So stops will also change, maybe daily, maybe weekly. IOW, where the stop is placed and what adjustments you might do will depend on where the P&L lies as well as the...

If you're lucky, when the world goes to shit, you'll be glowing and you'll be able to illuminate your house for free, if it's still standing. :)

AFAIK, it's a 4+ not 7+ month position. Near term dictates. You might want to model this one because if you're still using those unbalanced strikes as before, you'll need a March close outside of 2 and 7 just to break even as the condor loss and the Jun time decay spank you inside them.

If it includes Nov options expiring in 2 weeks, I don't see how it could be anything other than the chart performance of a June position over the next 2 weeks. That might change your opinion of the "long term."

"Obama and Congress declare war on Welpoint WLP" It's very sad what they're doing. They should declare was on all health insurance companies. As a warm up, their lobbyists would be good target practice.

Technically, slippage is the difference b/t the price you expect to trade at versus what you actually trade at. An example would be the fill from a market order. While I don't know if it's technically correct, many (including me) refer to the B/A difference as slippage.

Don't know anything about these two but am familiar with many of the components (BAC, USB, ING, JPM, WFC, C, etc.). Many were good for trading if that's your inclination. Other than RBS pfds, they're all fairly dead now... and even RBS is deadening out. During the credit crunch they were...

No, I wouldn't trade it. Too many legs, too much slippage, too many commissions, too much premium wasted on near term long options which expire soon and leave you with a widening break even each month. If you have to trade something like this, just buy 20 of the Mar 3/5 strangles as a...

It's multiple choice. Sell the calls for the income. Don't sell them for capital appreciation. Pick one. Live with the decision. :)

If the options trade for 20 cts, you'll be fill. My bet is that even with a gap, you'll get filled at 20 cts.

It might be a good play 1-3 weeks before an earnings announcement, scalping to offset time decay while nabbing some IV expansion.

I've attempted some gamma scalping with mixed results. Here are some things that I've experienced. For the initial stradddle, I think that the synthetic is better than two option legs. Less time decay to fight... and a position with only two legs is far easier to visualize than multiple...

Unless the stock has a trading halt, the options trade. I have no clue if there are any single exchange listings anymore - I think a sort of useless thing to keep track of (g). But if there were, the only other catch might be technical difficulties at the exchange and no trading for a...

I don't know what gives with TOS but in general, simulators don't offer 100% of the features of a broker's real platform.

Here's a link to the CBOE page where they provide contract adjustment details for recent corporate events. Check out the one for Terra Industries which also declared a large special dividend: http://www.cboe.com/tradtool/contracts.aspx

If you already own the stock, you use the options to achieve a collar. If one is thinking about doing a collar from scratch, the synthetic vertical is the better choice. I don't get the point of it being more expensive with options than stocks. To do what? As for Tsuie, I've seen some of...

The 40 and 45 calls have a delta of ONE. That means that whatever the stock drops, the calls will drop. When the stock goes ex-div by $4, those calls will drop $4. How are you going to make money from that? Now if by any chance you think that by writing those calls, when they drop by $4...

What don't you understand? ET is the place where people with 3/4 of a miilion in stock go to ask questions of people with 5-10 million of stock.