Let's Trade Options

Loved how the last 5 minutes of trading, SPY rose to above the mid-BB! And with the DIA being stopped by the lower BB (a move up next week will repaint the lower BB to touch the tail of this weeks candle), to me it looks very promising for some upward movement next week.....

...oops that's what I meant...I was talking about calls for today's expiry...I've never been ballsy enough to play those, tough....but I thought we would get a closing rally after JPow spoke.

Otherwise, I mostly bought SPY, SPX calls with 2-4 weeks ... mostly spreads outright but a I legged into a couple SPY verts for risk-free trades. I bought a SPXS put spread also (also a bullish trade)

Details later on a few....volume was pretty high....I am tired & need a nap.....I miss boring markets.....I rarely spend more than a few hours a week trading anymore....this week it has been many hours every day.

Have a good weekend all.

...these not so smart, always a bother when price blows by your spread, even thought they're defined risk, have to worry if your shit broker will snipe the itm short legs....they may make money next week, we'll see...

bot SPY 3/23 $326 calls for 35c, then sold the $327 calls for 52c....

bot SPXS $13 calendar puts @ $13 - Mar20/Apr17 for 25c

etc

bot this SPY calendar for 5c, it won't look so fat when the iv's drain out, if it gets up there. I will set up bullish trades like this to catch a rise from the Mar FOMC....

Does anyone know where I can get some practice paper trading options?

Clemmo, eTrade has a demo program you can trade options real time. I believe it comes equipped with $100K fake money. That's good to practice with, but if you want to be realistic after you have developed your skills, you can make some obvious bad trades to get the money down to what you would actually be trading with if it were a real account. That would give you a realistic idea of how your trading would be under actual conditions of trading....

If you are a US citizen you can get a TD Ameritrade account with 0 balance and use the best platform, Thinkorswim (ToS). If you're not in the US I think you can get a tastyworks account.

You can view options chains for any symbol on Yahoo Finance and paper trade with an actual pad of paper and a pencil. Nothing wrong with that.

To understand how spreads work, you really need a good platform that you can use to model the performance of options over time and with changing greeks. The best I know of is ToS.

There's also this thing, OptionsPlay...

https://www.optionsplay.com/

...but it's not free & I haven't looked at it in years.

If you really are interested I recommend you paper trade for at least 3-6 months before you try trading real money. Watch a lot of the videos on tastytrade and elsewhere. It has never been easier to learn to trade options, there's enough good content online to make an expert of anyone. Even if you just trade with pad/pencil, you need to watch how trades develop over time. Trade along with the traders on tastytrade or here. Money and I are very dissimilar, but that's a good thing to observe.

https://www.tastytrade.com/tt/

Good luck clemmo.

headlines keep coming, but also more and more actual data. I think the article below is a small step towards more clarity. namely, the mortality rate from COVID-19 is probably not going to be as high as originally thought - probably closer to 0.2% than to 2%.

This is closer to the mortality rate from the common flu - which is about 0.1% in the USA and maybe as much as twice that in less developed countries. So, who knows, one more kind of flu floating around in the USA may not actually mean more flu deaths, when it's all said and done.

Deaths from the flu are most common from complications like pneumonia and other infections that get traction because the victim's immune system is weakened. The old and already sick are more common amongst the dead.

A flu that hits hard at the respiratory system is going to prey more heavily on a population that lives in places that have chronic air pollution (like Wuhan) - the latter maybe an untold story in all the press about COVID-19.

Anyway, these headlines, declarations of States of Emergency (in WA where I live) etc, etc, will probably just mean more free-falling equities. I'd bet we will see SnP <2700 before we see 3,250 again...

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/l...202153407.html

The CDC has lots of cool webpages, if you like that kind of thing...

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season...-2017-2018.htm

Johns Hopkins University Is sorta at the forefront of this novel coronavirus work, and they have a real time tracker, including a mobile site with good info at:

systems.jhu.edu

I've had it on my phone for a couple of weeks.....

I agree with the panic being a little overboard. The coronavirus is just a group of viruses that we already know and love. They cause the common cold, the flu, the fever virus in children, pneumonia, and even MERS and SARS, so this isn't a new alien life form or anything. it is consider a 'novel' coronavirus ((nCoV) in the fact that it hasn't been see in humans before, just animals. But a big factor in that could just be because no one has LOOKED for that particular strain.

People are running around trying to get the N95 masks thinking that will save them, but they aren't form fitted, so there will be leaks around the mouth and chin. But people forget the eyes....that mask won't help if someone coughs in your eyes. BSI (Body Substance Isolation) protocols for airborne or known infections always include eye protection. People also don't realize that an N95 mask basically covers any kind of dust masks-type masks, but it is the Class II rating of a particular N95 that is saying it is good for viral protection, and the masks you get at Home Depot and Walmart don't have that. An N95 mask serves a better purpose when it is worn by someone sick rather than someone trying to keep from getting sick. Just keep your hands clean...wipe the shopping carts off, try not to touch door handles and common use pens and sanitize your hands after you use a credit card or gas pump keypad...

Right now, more people are recovering than are being infected, and that is a good sign. It sounds terrible when only the total confirmed cases of 87470 and the total deaths of 2990 are on the news 24/7, but no one is talking about the 42670 of the total confirmed cases that have recovered. And that is increasing at a faster rate than new cases are being confirmed. I've been watching it for a couple of weeks.

Heck, remember the 2018-2019 flue season? It was really bad, lasted like 23 weeks. The CDC said up to 42.3 million people got sick, up to 610,000 were hospitalized and between 35K-57K+ died. And that is just one flu season!! So this, while the spreading of a sickness is always bad, it is really nothing out of the ordinary, other than it came from one localized area in china...that just happened to be near a lab the studies stuff like this. But this isn't a flesh eating bacteria or a neurological issue or causes blindness, it is just a different strain of a flu-like virus. And I'm sure it isn't the only one we don't know about.

When people realize the hype is over the top, the markets will rebound like a Superball (did I just show my age with that?)….

This is something I have been thinking about getting involved with, as I would like to diversify.

This thread is quite old, however.

Are Options still worth trading or has a lot changed for Options' trading since 2013?

......I have rolls of anti-bacterial 12-ply gauze and I might tape that over my whole face if I am feeling antsy. I don't do the hand sanitizer thing but instead I wear nitrile gloves when I go to the store, then soak them in weak bleach solution when I get home. I think the most common vector more people ignore is touching things that are freighted with germs and then touching their own eyes or lips, sticking finger in their nose, etc. Ultimately one easier thing to do is just avoid going places where a lot of people are or have been. Not to hard for those of us who work at home. Nevertheless, I already had the flu this season, back in November....

....yeah I think so too. We might have a u-bottom and we probably haven't seen it starting yet, but we'll see.

...lol

/ES opens big gap down, @ 2912 now....

That's funny, and humor is always appreciated on here; lightens the seriousness of the trading mood.

But, just in case you ARE serious, the answer to your question is: Yes, options are still worth trading.....

...now bid, up 18, we will see if Friday's strong close can get some legs in the new week. I have a bunch of bull traps laying wait......

"CREDIT ANTICIPATES, EQUITY CONFIRMS."

....easy money