Only a profit until the feb. contract expires right? Then your long QLGC for a month. If you do nothing your QLGC is gone in a month. Profit of 32, not bad. What are all your commissions?
My commissions are $1 per contract each way. So I spent $4 total on commissions today. I'm only using these to daytrade, I had no particular intention of holding even the February contracts until expiration. I was in fact up $120 today in the early afternoon. But I didn't sell my two contracts at the peak, so I'm about broken even now assuming QLGC opens tuesday where it closed monday. I'm planning to avoid OneChicago until they get their seemingly ongoing technical problems worked out. I don't think they're that risky to use, but they seem to have at least one day a week where they're down for at least 2 minutes due to technical problems. NQLX seems stabler.
people complaining about lack of volume are probaby not familiar with options. A volume of 40 contracts on an option is not bad. Also spreads of 25 cents or more are common with options. For people like me who just want to make a directional bet on a stock, the SSF's seem clearly superior. Its interesting you mentioned QLGC, i used to play the front month options with that one all the time.
Well, I sold the two contracts that I had held overnight. I was lucky, QLGC outperformed the majority of the tech stocks today. I'm up a total of $37 since monday morning. After the $6 commissions. I feel like I'm having to recover from behavior modification. I'm so used to being paralyzed by the spreads and the time-decay of options and the PDT limitations. I have to deprogram my conditioning about how I think about selling. I'm so used to feeling I have to sit on a position until the very perfect moment, and refraining from selling because I'm trying to hold overnight. I have to convince my brain that I really can buy and sell as often as I want. Of course, I just sold at the wrong moment. I'd already be up another $30 now, if I hadn't sold 20 minutes ago. Oh well! At least I made a profit overall, on my first experience.
Where can you get free realtime quotes for SSF's, they will never catch up if you can't find these quotes anywhere!
I get realtime quotes from Interactive Brokers trader station. The most it could cost is $10 a month even if you just opened an account with them for the quotes and never traded at all. If you make $30 commissions per month the quotes are free.
Well, ok, the QLGC is down 35 cents from where I sold it 3½ hours ago, so I'm $70 ahead for having sold. Of course, I'd be $100 ahead of where I am if I had sold two more contracts 3 hours ago. In other news, CVS and AVP (Avon) were both up today after positive earnings reports.
Once you got a good feel for SSFs, you will have to come up with a strategy. If it mirrors the underlying you gotta trade it the same way you would trade the stock, taking into account the low vol (meaning that you'd have to pay the spread if you wanted to get out fast). Since you turned a profit, whatever you did today might work. Good luck, vorzo
Try http://www.alaron.com/ssf_resource/ssf_quotes.htm They have the charts from futuresource.com. Here's an example: http://www.futuresource.com/charts/charts.asp?sym=NQQQG03