Does anybody have any suggestion or experience trading options on foriegn stocks or indexes. I am a professional market maker at the CBOE and work until 3:30pm CT. I would like to manage some option position trades at night for my personal account. I have used IB for some option spreads on US securities, but have no experience trading foriegn markets. Any suggestions concerning what markets, brokers, or strategies I should explore would be very helpful. Thanks, Steve
sgxnk @sgx has options, volumes are non-existent but they are autoquoted with 50/50 on each side so u got liquidity there if is a concern for u; relatively cheap considerin' ranges. kospi on the other hand has very liquid options that do huge volumes but am not familiar with 'em..all available at ib.
I believe LIFFE may be your only choice (starting at about 2am CST and closing around 7am). KOSPI options, for example, are not legally available to US citizens. You can, of course, trade US options on foreign underlyings through CME (yen, nikkei) http://www.cftc.gov/opa/backgrounder/opapart30.htm The anticipation of KOSPI options has been long in coming. http://www.sfomag.com/homefeaturedetail.asp?ID=-1211687410&MonthNameID=October&YearID=2003
Hey guys, thanks a lot for your advice... I'm going to look into the Liffe markets... I want something that only trades at night so I don't have to worry about big moves while I am at work.
Be sure to check out all the big Eurex futures contracts (bund, dax etc.) the options on these futures trade big volume with tight spreads. I'm not a big fan of LIFFE contracts, the charts look good but the volume is very chunky and I find them hard to trade.