I've been successfully trading short naked stock options with Thinkorswim for several years and now looking for opportunity to sell short OTM futures options. I've run thru the half of the list of futures brokers at http://www.cmegroup.com/tools-information/find-a-broker/broker-directory-na.html but still didn't find a suitable one. The process of perusing thru hundreds of pages of each broker terms is quite laborious and very frustrating when in the end it comes out that they don't actually provide the possibility to sell naked futures options. I've recently registered at this place and found it quite useful, so maybe you members could advise what broker to choose. I need a broker to match the following criteria: 1)Good trading platform. Better free. 2)Possibility to analyze any option strategy in full details, all greeks, historical and implied volatility, good charting 3)Reasonable r/t commissions 4)Free market data 5)Paper trading - Obligatory. 6)Broker can accept international accounts from EU. P.S. -Do not recommend Interactive Brokers, please. I don't accept their policy of auto liquidating positions. With my previous broker I had 2 cases during the last year, when my account slightly exceeded margins during a day, but later I closed the trades with a profit. -OptionExpress commissions are too high -I contacted Dorman twice, but didn't get any feedback. -Craig Ross from ApexFutures.com gave me a quick response "There are not many platforms out there that have options and even fewer that allow naked option selling. I'll have to get back to yu on that." -Sent an email to Velocity Futures a week ago, but didn't get any reply yet. Contacted them again today thru their contact form. Waiting for reply.
Velocity Futures sent me a reply today: "At this time we do not allow clients to sell naked options. Generally we are a futures only shop with very few exceptions."
to sum it up: Only PFG best turned to be more or less suitable. As for support, I would give it a good mark. Pretty fast and responsive. But, as for the PFG pro trader platform, it's not suitable for trading options on futures. The drawbacks are: There's no Implied volatility for options. There's no open interest and volume for options chains, which is totally unacceptable. I wonder, who would want to trade options with them. The interactive brokers TWS platform made an impression on me. Pretty heavy but still has everything you can think of. But the bad thing about IB is a very bad support. I would say even its absence. I would never choose a broker with no support, since the only time you would ever need them is a bad situation, when you need them badly. So, I'm nowhere so far. Turned back to equity options again.
TOS just offers a few options on futures. Here's an email from the tos support on that: "Thank you for the email. We currently only support the /ES and /NQ options as they make up most of the electronic volume. We will indeed be offering more futures options in the next couple of months and we will be sure to keep everyone posted via the release notes we send out. Have a nice afternoon. Sincerely, Pablo" A year past since that, but as far as I know, nothing has changed
That's actually false. TOS also has options for corn, wheat, soybeans, euro, bonds, notes and they are adding the rest sometime this year. Expensive place to trade though.
all you need to do is buy another option against it to cap your risk,it will allow you to increase size,which will offset the slight profit drop on a credit spread vs naked short
I LOLed. However don't blame our beloved OTM option seller he's just exercising his God-given right to sell naked within the risk parameters the clearing firm requires. If the clearing firm blows up I wouldn't blame him, but the morons at the clearing firm.