Glad to see I have company with Babu. Atticus is worse than the Pentagon for talking in acronyms. Haven´t a clue what he said and was discussing.
You've got a short vol spread that's probably going to expire worthless, but if it is one tick wrong on the close, you get left with a load of stock. It's about the unexpected non-zero premium, and how not-riskless the estimated PnL should be booked. edit: Simple, right?
Eyeballing it. I think you are right on the atm, and high on the 5 wide strangle (5 wide is almost 80bps on 16 vol stock). I like the weekly/monthly calendar however. The risk reward is favorable. However, I am not in it.
Just curious, don't most brokers let you cover exercised options during the next session without any charges/penalties? I suppose there might be some sort of limit cuz $600000 of intra-day margin in my sub $5000 account might be a little extreme. But if there's no penalties then the only real risk to letting it expire would be the amount of gap at the next session. Although, given that options expire on Friday I suppose that's a fairly legitimate risk over a weekend.
Here's what atticus is saying: ScottandMo has a short straddle. He expects it to mostly expire worthless (meaning he expects the straddle he sold at 640 to be $0 at expiration) What atticus is saying is that no, that doesn't happen in practice. So he shouldn't calculate his expected profit and loss with such assumptions. Even in the final day of expiration, it will most likely have a value- he gave a HYPOTHETICAL example (which, if I recall correctly, he has done in the past for you) of the value being $1.80 to $2.00. (Straddle = sell a call and then sell a put at the same strike) That's all it is. I really dumbed it down from Rational's answer.
Understand the neutral, but curious about 5-wide strangle, that just means if GOOG is at 642, the value of a 640 call + 645 put should be $5, but would probably sell for $4.55, thus losing $0.45?
This is probably more suited on a software thread, BUT I see IB quoting GOOG ATM implied at around 140 range TOS on the other hand quotes it at 100 ish For the monthly exp, both IB and TOS have similar ATM IV. What gives? Perhaps IB calculates based on Last traded price while TOS calculates it on Mid-price? Anyone?