Tom is right: While looking at the strategy in strategy builder you can manipulate each leg as you wish. Once saved, it is stored as a single order and can no longer have the individual legs adjusted; only the overall price.
That was something I was sad to see (would have been nice to set up all my multi-leg orders then tweak them later until I was ready to submit).
As for the odd prices you see JSOP: That sometimes happens under the following conditions:
1) You are doing this outside of market hours (it fails to fetch reasonable prices for mid points and does not use the mark price)
2) You are doing this on one or more legs whose options are thinly traded and you are getting a horrible price on each (and multiple bad prices add up to a really bad price)
3) You didn't want long enough for the price to refresh in TWS (I sometimes setup a couple of legs and then click on mid -> submit only to be presented a price that makes no sense... if I waited 30s or so sometimes, the price gets updated correctly).
TWS is a sophisticated feature-rich *broad appeal* platform in my opinion. It does a little of everything well, but nothing great. If speed of combo creation & execution are vital this is not the platform of choice. But if you have plenty of time to set it up and tweak it before you submit it, then it works well.
(I sometimes feel its more for people who do a few big trades a week rather than many small trades a day). I tend to fall into the 'few slow transactions a week' camp, which is why I still like TWS.
(Don't love, but like).
Btw, a lot of the Option related tools are quite interesting and look rather powerful from an analytical point of view. So it might be worthwhile investigating and studying to see how they can help you. But I feel it is really more for people who want to spend the half day or so finding the ideal strategy, and then execute it (and probably not close it for days/weeks/months).
If you are interested in multiple rapid multi-leg option trading I would not use TWS (it's a sluggish UI with very slow loading of ticker prices). Trying to go through 10+ a day where load times are critical can be painful. I remember on more than one occasion having to plan to close out positions 30-45mins before market close due to the sluggishness of the UI (sometimes takes 5 minutes to load the symbols/tickers/order and finally click submit).
That was something I was sad to see (would have been nice to set up all my multi-leg orders then tweak them later until I was ready to submit).
As for the odd prices you see JSOP: That sometimes happens under the following conditions:
1) You are doing this outside of market hours (it fails to fetch reasonable prices for mid points and does not use the mark price)
2) You are doing this on one or more legs whose options are thinly traded and you are getting a horrible price on each (and multiple bad prices add up to a really bad price)
3) You didn't want long enough for the price to refresh in TWS (I sometimes setup a couple of legs and then click on mid -> submit only to be presented a price that makes no sense... if I waited 30s or so sometimes, the price gets updated correctly).
TWS is a sophisticated feature-rich *broad appeal* platform in my opinion. It does a little of everything well, but nothing great. If speed of combo creation & execution are vital this is not the platform of choice. But if you have plenty of time to set it up and tweak it before you submit it, then it works well.
(I sometimes feel its more for people who do a few big trades a week rather than many small trades a day). I tend to fall into the 'few slow transactions a week' camp, which is why I still like TWS.
(Don't love, but like).
Btw, a lot of the Option related tools are quite interesting and look rather powerful from an analytical point of view. So it might be worthwhile investigating and studying to see how they can help you. But I feel it is really more for people who want to spend the half day or so finding the ideal strategy, and then execute it (and probably not close it for days/weeks/months).
If you are interested in multiple rapid multi-leg option trading I would not use TWS (it's a sluggish UI with very slow loading of ticker prices). Trying to go through 10+ a day where load times are critical can be painful. I remember on more than one occasion having to plan to close out positions 30-45mins before market close due to the sluggishness of the UI (sometimes takes 5 minutes to load the symbols/tickers/order and finally click submit).
you should be able to keep the same model but just adjust the expiry dates or strikes with a click. so what you actually use to trade options? "I build combos once, on a QuoteMonitor page" in TWS?