It depends on the timeframe of your trade whether to go with a call or a call fly; the fly doesn't have as much delta; it loses value past 80; and the call sells for more for the simple fact that it's worth more - if it wasn't a fair difference in price, it would be easy money to sell the relatively overpriced call and buy the relatively underpriced fly; but wait: that amounts to 2 short 80's and 1 long 90. Why would that be a good strategy? I like that flies can be used to exploit IV strike price contango though!
After reading up on this fly thread I tried to model a few cases to see the interplay of various strikes, underlying and IV. The analysis was too complicated and time consuming for me as I only have Excel to work with. For ATM, 132/231 seemed directional, 121's more or less delta neutral? So, I still need a good opinion (of delta, gamma, vega, or IV) to make money. Conclusion: No free lunch for us retails.
I suggest you install ToS demo. You don't need an account and allows you to do pretty decent stuff. Works for 60 days.
Thank you for your suggestion. I will try it out. I did install IB, tried that for a while but decided not to - old habit dies hard. I have been with Schwab for years, migrated to their OptionsXpress platform then back to Schwab... Can ToS do more than Schwab's StreetSmartEdge and StreetSmart Central?
TOS/TDA's desktop app is decent. IMO the iOS app is the best available. I would like to see the phone app stop the error code when building verticals, but otherwise it's very solid. On the desktop; allow for stressing of vol x strike.
One of you taught me how to program in VBA in Excel and that helped some but it is still very cumbersome. Perhaps I should go back to Fortran?
Would be nice if you could program and create a cool video game but if you use ToS analyzer you can easily do FLYS and similar vol trades.