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Make a better forecast :)

The short answer is in your 2nd sentence. You finance part of the cost of the long strangle with sale of short strangles. Or more explicitly, you finance some, possiblyall of the time decay. The not so short answer is that the two strangles have similar but disparate rates of decay. If you...

Shorting is less dangerous than going long. Markets don't melt up.

Were you burned by a churning brokers bad advice or do you have no clue how to trade frequently for a profit?

That's not correct. Margin on stock is 50% and for naked puts is 20%. When you adjust for all the in/out of the money and apply premium received, a covered call is approximately 2-3x as expensive, margin wise. But you are correct in that there's no free lunch with one covered call versus...

You're not collecting any dividends up front today. You're getting a higher put premium but it's maybe 60% of the total dividends b/t now and expiration. The further out in time you go, the less premium per day that you receive and the closer to ATM, the more time premium per day. In that...

I don't know the particulars but I suspect that all of the ECN's are not included in the reported best bid/ask. At times, I have placed an order that improves price yet it is not reflected in best bid/ask yet gets filled. As for outside best bid/ask, I suspect that there may be conditional...

100 suckers a year at 3 grand a pop is a pretty good gig. If he was that good, he'd be trading his own money and running a huge hedge fund. He's not and he's trolling.

With IV expansion, all months inflate, more so the front month. After the EA, the near month's IV will contract more but the far months "may" lose more value. I don't know the technical description so perhaps a hypothethetical example. Suppose IV is 50 across the board. The front month...

The IRS offers free E-filing at their web site if you make $57,000 or less a year. So you click the icon and it takes you to the page with the Free File details. Near the bottom of the page it says, "Made more than $57,000 in 2009? You can also file your taxes online through e-file." So you...

THE VERY FIRST THING I look in the morning the walls of my bedroom. I gotta make sure I'm not in a coffin.

Go into ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT and select ACTIVITY STATEMENTS. The 3rd item (about 2 page downs) is CREATE AND EDIT TEMPLATES. Select a name and whatever categories of info you want, save it, run it and VOILA !

The cost is dependent on the number of trade you make. My recollection is that up to 200 records is something like $75 per with 2-3 higher price increments for a larger number of trades. The $297 is for an unlimited number of records. After the first year, renewal costs 20% less (at least on...

What's the point of having a margin account? You can take a spread position for say a coupla hundred dollars and not have to pony up the full cost of buying or shorting the stock. The rules are that you need a margin account for short positions. Since vertical spreads include a short leg...

LOL... Here's my last stab at this. Reality is, dividends are priced into the options. It makes no sense to use a model that doesn't price the dividends in because then anything that you do with those numbers will be inaccurate. IV will be off as will any pre expiration risk graph. Why...

What's best depends on what the underlying does. Using half of the premium to buy extra puts and calls would make the position more like a long strangle than an iron condor on the wings. I have no clue what serving as units means.

Yeh, what a moron Buffett is. What's his portfolio up, 100 fold? 500 fold? A thousand fold? What does he know???

Apart from needing to seriously proofread, Hornsby had it right as to how dividends affect option prices. If you know the effect then you know how much of the premium that you are receiving is artificial, eg. due to a pending corporate event (ex-div). I think that's an important thing to...

What's best depends on what the underlying does. Using half of the premium to buy extra puts and calls would make the position more like a long strangle than an iron condor on the wings. I have no clue what serving as units means.