Hello there fellow gamblers sorry traders In the couple of days I have encountered what I thought were "missing" prices for ES options in IB. The quote lines were there but for particular contracts there were no prices. The missing prices were for *some* calls for expiry tomorrow. E.g. I loaded up 1100 to 1200 strikes and all puts prices were shown but calls for prices from 1100 to 1180 were missing. You can see the screenshot attached. this was (is) particularly an issue for me cos I am short some 1175 call options that expire tomorrow. I had wanted to close them out but couldn't (no quotes) so I ended up hedging with long ES. Anyway I opened up a chat session with IB to find out how to "fix" this issue and to cut a long story short they said that nobody is obliged to make a market in those options and so nobody is obliged to provide a quote. This is the first time I have seen (or perhaps noticed) this but the guy was quite certain - he said look at NG for example there are hundreds of options without quotes. Is he (IB) correct on this? It has implications for risk management because only the last sold price is available in TWS and hence to the account page where it works out your balances, excess liquidity etc. Also of course it is not nice being stuck in an option position that you can't see the price of. And if nobody is obliged to make a market in these options, does that mean that whenever I buy or write an option I need to bear in mind that I might not be able to find a counterpart to close the transaction with when I want to (e.g. sell to close or buy to close)? This is very important to me so many thanks for any help/pointers.
Apologies for this double post, neither of which showed up in the thread list when I initially posted them.
Thanks guys. Regarding the last point, which seems to have huge implications for trading: if there is no market maker obliged to make a market in these options, surely what follows is that when opening a position you cannot be certain that you will be able to close it either when you want to or even at all prior to expiry. Is that correct?