Hello all. I had a broker that offered a real-time option scanner for free through a third-party arrangement it secured. It was a nice feature and it worked great, but the broker has done away with this nice client benefit. All good things come to an end, I suppose. What I like to do is perform a scan for covered calls at a desired distance out of the money with bids, and then pick one to buy the stock and sell the call. Can also be done with cash-secured puts. It can be called a Real-Time Scanner or sometimes a Strategy Scanner. What I have found thus far is that there are a few services that offer this data, but it's delayed, or updated once a day or a few times a day. Not very useful! Some services have actually claimed to offer "Real-Time", but I've found that claim to not be true. I have yet to find a service offering true real-time data for this type of search. Was wondering if there are traders in this forum who are using or have used a real-time option scanner service that can be recommended? Many thanks and happy trading!
Very interesting that you mentioned Power Options, and thank you! Of all the services I sampled, this was the most promising. It seems you felt the same. I actually subscribed to the real-time service at $120/month. The most pricey I saw, but it seemed like it had the goods. It turns out that the results that you SEE are real-time. But only what you see. Deletions to the search are immediate. New additions to the search are delayed by about 20 minutes. 20 minutes is an eternity. Essentially you see the options that no one wanted because they weren't desirable (excessive risk or excessive liquidity required). I proved it out the 3 reliable ways that it can be proved out, which is 1) by creating my own option order and seeing how long it took to be included in the search results, 2) by stumbling upon multiple options that belonged in the search results and timing how long they took to appear, and 3) noting search results that appear minutes after market close, and then again quite a while later, as there should be no further additions sans some ETFs. In every case, it took at least 20 minutes. I took screen shots and sent them to the co-owners. One partner said this week that he is going to work with the programmers to see if they can reduce the delay. I have no time frame, and I don't know where this will lead. I'll report back if they do indeed improve it, as it's the right thing to do. But I find it curious that, as of right now, deletions to the results are immediate and additions are not. Doesn't make sense to me, and that wasn't occurring when one of my brokers was providing an option scanner, which it no longer does. Haven't seen the term "smart search xl", and the co-owners didn't mention it, but it SHOULD be what I'm paying for in the real-time service. If not, I would think they would have said something. Thanks for bringing this one right up, as well as providing the links, as it doesn't come up much in web searches!
We have a real-time options scanner that connects to a stock scanner and can be fed from our backtester. Our scanner has three theoretical values for each trade, probability of profit, reward to risk, market width, OI, greeks that you can filter. The stock scanner finds tickers that match your criteria. For example, I use it for earnings scans: earnings this week forecasted earnings move greater than implied ORATS implied earnings move > typical earnings move average options volume > 1000 contracts, stock price > 25 Then I find strategies like straddles or strangles that have positive edge vs our forecasted volatility surface models that predict earnings moves, short term and long term IV, and skew. That is our forecast theo value, F%. https://gyazo.com/bb0a296988c45e289120bc7381c11d19 Once you find a trade, we show the live bid ask, payoff picture with break-evens and you can send your trade to paper trading to track performance and then to brokers. https://orats.com/option-scanner
https://www.barchart.com/get-barchart-premier?ref=allOptions Does it but does not say if it is real-time if you pay.
"Forecasted larger than implied" What do you mean with forecasted, forecasted by whom exactly and who is the dissemination source of that metric? Thanks