Hoadley Trading & Investment Tools... ???

[justrading]

Quote from comintel:

It's probably good enough for this purpose.

All you need is current day values - you do not need historical data.

The tool will display current implied volatility over many strikes. You can easily see any discrepancies.

I interpreted "It's very sporadic and incomplete" to mean the incoming data is sporadic and incomplete, not that there is missing historical data.

The rep I chatted with is the designated contact for the Hoadley tools, so presumably he knows what he is talking about.

Me: So effectively you are saying it will not be adequate?

Rep: Most likely not.

When a sales person tells me his product will most likely not meet my needs, I am inclined to believe him.

 

[cdcaveman]

Quote from justrading:

An update on my investigation into a data source for the Hoadley tool.

On his website http://www.hoadley.net/options/develtoolsESignal.htm he talks up eSignal.

Well I just had a chat with the eSignal rep who was honest enough to tell me that "our futures options data is very poor"and when I asked what he meant, he said "It's very sporadic and incomplete".

Presumably they have had complaints about it, that is why they are up-front. But looking at Hoadley's site, you could not tell about this problem could you?

So I am looking into the Barcharts offering, but I have to say this revelation has left me rather wary of buying the Hoadley package.

Has anyone used Options Oracle? http://www.samoasky.com/.

The forum is no longer active apparently.

i have downloaded and messed with it.. so frustrating ... plus what do you do if you wanna look at something that everyone else isn't looking at? you can't tweek it at all.. . my experience is.. it sucks

 

[cdcaveman]

Quote from justrading:

I know what you mean. I once had a website that I paid a company to design, then I started 2 wordpress blogs on my own. The guy who worked on my site was OK, but not the sharpest tool in the toolshed for sure.

Basically, what I need right now is a way to get the options chains from the data feed to the Hoadley tool or whatever I end up using.

you can pull down MSN or Cboe quotes with the hoadley tool and if you look at your brokerage account and think you can do better then the what the options are quoting you can make the minor adjustments without any problems and it will simultaneously reflect in the strategy payoff graph... it would be nice to stream live quotes right into the strategy payoff graph.. i'm not there yet though

 

[cdcaveman]

Quote from justrading:


I know what you mean. I once had a website that I paid a company to design, then I started 2 wordpress blogs on my own. The guy who worked on my site was OK, but not the sharpest tool in the toolshed for sure..

i've run through the wordpress code in and out... every "web developer" i've ever hired i ended up finding out they knew less then i did by the time the project was done... One time i took a project away from a guy because he was stuck and finished it myself.. i didn't end up doing alot of the work at first because i was intimidated by code. its freaking amazing to me the lack of knowledge these so called "developers" have..

 

[cdcaveman]

Quote from justrading:

I interpreted "It's very sporadic and incomplete" to mean the incoming data is sporadic and incomplete, not that there is missing historical data.

The rep I chatted with is the designated contact for the Hoadley tools, so presumably he knows what he is talking about.

Me: So effectively you are saying it will not be adequate?

Rep: Most likely not.

When a sales person tells me his product will most likely not meet my needs, I am inclined to believe him.

so your looking for options on futures data? to drag into hoadley right?

 

[comintel]

Quote from justrading:

I interpreted "It's very sporadic and incomplete" to mean the incoming data is sporadic and incomplete, not that there is missing historical data.

The rep I chatted with is the designated contact for the Hoadley tools, so presumably he knows what he is talking about.

Me: So effectively you are saying it will not be adequate?

Rep: Most likely not.

When a sales person tells me his product will most likely not meet my needs, I am inclined to believe him.

He may be the designated sales contact for 89 minor products and not be familiar with each one.

Why don't you email that quote to Hoadley and ask him to comment?

All we are looking for is the daily settlement prices for each strike. How could they mess that up? They are right on the CME web site every day.

Why does esignal offer the service if it is useless? Something does not add up.

 

[justrading]

Quote from cdcaveman:

so your looking for options on futures data? to drag into hoadley right?

That is correct. Not looking at Stock or Index options, only futures options.

 

[cdcaveman]

Quote from justrading:

That is correct. Not looking at Stock or Index options, only futures options.

not to be nosey but why do you wanna do that? for the below reason?

?futures options, however, offer unique advantages; for example, they can allow
you to trade with superior margin rules (known as SPAN margin), which allow more efficient use of your trading capital.

?

 

[justrading]

Quote from comintel:

He may be the designated sales contact for 89 minor products and not be familiar with each one.

Why don't you email that quote to Hoadley and ask him to comment?

All we are looking for is the daily settlement prices for each strike. How could they mess that up? They are right on the CME web site every day.

Why does esignal offer the service if it is useless? Something does not add up.

I do not use eSignal, so I have to take what I am told at face value.

What would you think if you were involved in this?

Rep - : The best I can offer you is $1 for the 1st 30-days. The OnDemand service will give you delayed data. That is fine for you correct?

Rep - : You will NOT get options data with this service.

Me: I was on a chat with another rep earlier and I specifically asked for US futures options data and he said yes for this package.

Rep - : Futures options yes however I futures options data is very poor

Rep - : I meant "our futures options data is very poor".

Rep - : Futures options data is a weak point in our product offering

Me: Meaning?

Me: Hoadley does mention esignal as you know

Rep - : It's very sporadic and incomplete

Rep - : Yes, I know. I am listed on their website as the contact person

Rep - : Equity options are a different story

Rep - : Futures options is a weak point

Me: So effectively you are saying it will not be adequate?

Rep - : Most likely not.

I did email Hoadley. He gave me a lengthy reply, the crux of it being " There may be issues with the futures options data but I have never had any feedback about that."

He noted that the cost of his software is pretty low and thus most people simply buy it and try it out.

As for your point about the only thing needed is the settlement prices, this is what Hoadley had to say about the subject;

My software uses option chain snapshots – but they are real-time. Snapshot doesn’t mean delayed. It means that all quotes are at exactly the same point in time (which in the case of the suppliers I support is real-time)

And,

There are no free end of day futures option chain data available that you can feed directly into my software. If you know of any you can put the chain edata into a CSV file which my software can read.

In short, there may be problems, I don't know, buy the software and see. No trial possible, I asked.

 

[justrading]

Quote from cdcaveman:

not to be nosey but why do you wanna do that? for the below reason?

?futures options, however, offer unique advantages; for example, they can allow
you to trade with superior margin rules (known as SPAN margin), which allow more efficient use of your trading capital.

?

No problem. I am sticking to futures options because;

1) there are less than 25 instruments / symbols that I need to track, ie that I see as having sufficient price movement and that tie in to global macro scenarios. Stuff like weather futures I have no interest in, I might as well use that money for lottery tickets.

2) The indicators that I am working on for entry based on price of the underlying require quite a bit of work every day to update. It would be impractical to do this for a large number of stock symbols. I suppose a good programmer could write a routine to scan for criteria, but I'm doing it by eyeballing charts for the key decision step.

3) Rightly or wrongly, I feel that being closer to the domicile market means easier access to news that impact stock prices. I am in Thailand, keeping my finger on the pulse of the local market is easy for me - press, plus the Stock Exchange fairly promptly posts research ratings on its portal which I have access to. For the States I would probably need to subscribe to the WSJ and frankly I hate reading stuff on my computer. I can work for hours on spreadsheets, 10 minutes reading and I'm ready to climb the wall.

I have not considered SPAN margin much. I got some examples of SPAN margin from my brokers risk management dept, it basically only comes into play if you are writing options or using stuff like protective calls / puts on a futures position. For straight buying of calls and puts, no margin just pay 100% of the premium.

I never say never, in future I might decide to trade options on stocks, but for now I'm sticking with what I am more familiar with.