Posts
Premium vs margin calculation
If using margin at 5% annual, I’m trying to see if selling a bear call spread makes sense. SELL DDOG 265 call BUY DDOG 280 call Premium say $700, margin requirement $1100. How would the thought process work?
[MU] Earnings IV Crush Setup for Oct 2nd
**Thesis and Setup for Friday (Oct 2) contract** My profit source is IV crush. After earnings, implied volatility drops and the short option legs lose value, so I can close them for a profit. A change here is that I am good to own MU at the strike of selection …
Dealing with market dislocations and short options
I was looking at some quotes for SPX on April 9th 2025. It seems spreads widened dramatically during the big almost 10% move up. It seemed asking prices looked correct based on option models but bidding prices were very low. So you might have something like bid $6, ask $60. …
Does theta decay during non-trading hours?
I was reviewing the P&L on a paper-traded short strangle and noticed that my AI was calculating theta decay using trading hours. My understanding was that Black–Scholes runs in continuous time, so I searched this sub expecting a straightforward answer. I did not expect the question to be this contentious. …
Does GEX / Options Flow actually help you trade?
I've been looking into GEX and options flow more lately and I'm still not convinced how useful either one actually is. I understand the idea behind GEX. Dealer positioning, positive vs negative gamma, potential support and resistance levels, etc. But you don't actually know the dealers' positions or why they're …
got assigned friday and spent the whole weekend refreshing news
not even about the money its the not being able to do anything about it. sold some puts that finished ITM, broker assigned me fine but then friday night a headline drops that sends everything sideways and Im sitting with shares I never wanted, watching futures move, no way to …
Volatility and selling covered calls
Still learning the ropes here, and want to see if I’m thinking about this correctly. Say I have 100 shares of a stock I would like to hold onto long-term, while at the same time earning some extra money by selling covered calls. If the implied volatility is greater than …
SPX vs ES for Option Selling
I've been trading in ES options for a while now and have had no issues with it. For some reason I now find myself in a position to switch to SPX options\* and in my initial, shallow experiment I noticed that selling an SPX option attracts way higher margin than …
Which brokerage is good for international traders and has a dependable API for third party devs?
We are looking to add support for another brokerage to the Optionsmith trading platform because we currently support Schwab accounts only -- and have many folks who want to use the platform but they are in countries where Schwab isn't available. If you are a trader in one of these …
Low effort strategy
My post was removed for low effort, which is ironic. The basic premise is that the underlying price movement is key in finding stocks as well as determining if the options are mispriced. Whoever reported it for low effort should read the simple words above. I have a novel but …