You sounded as if you know everything. But since you know everyone in this industry, you don't need my help. LOL. If you want to bet, I can show you my trade confirmation with only 1 contract and the commission is 0.75 + sec fee. You can't get it. That doesn't mean nobody can get it. I have more than one brokers, and every broker charges me 0.75 / contract without any cancellation fee.
for no vol requirement? if you do 20 contracts a year? a steak dinner says no way. go to think or swim right now and put 50k in and ask for 75 cents with no requirments. if you get with no min';s i'll take your family to any restraunt in world
Are you serious? I'll show you a TOS statement. Do you have a TOS account? How much are you paying? BTW I don't have any vol req in my terms with the brokerage firms, but I have no idea if they will change my commission schedule if I trade only 20 contracts a year.
If you direct route to BOX, aren't you charged $1.75/contract for the trade rather than $.75/contract?
I daytrade options. All the caveats you mentioned are true. And I can add that, when you're buying because of a big intraday move in the underlying with the expectation that it will reverse, the reversal will collapse the IV and you may find the option doesn't increase in value at all even if the underlying moves by a few percent. All that being said, daytrading long options can be worth it, I believe, in certain cases. I trade stocks and futures, but will trade options intraday or for an overnight hold in specific cases where I want the leverage or want to limit my loss. I daytrade options in OIH because the underlying is just too expensive. Yes, this means that a 50-cent movement will only get me 20 cents, but that means I make $200 on an outlay of $3.5K instead of $60K. I daytraded JTX options yesterday and today. When a stock is moving down 10%-20% intraday and I don't expect any news release from the company until after hours, the position may need to be held overnight to take advantage of an expected gap up in the morning, but I don't want to risk even $10K on an overnight hold like this. I made one options daytrade following it up yesterday afternoon on its initial reversal. After that it went down again, and I bought $2800 in May options near the close, all of which were sold over a few hours this morning after the gap up. But if the stock hadn't recovered today, these options are good for another 6 weeks, with an IV of around 50 and a theta of 2 cents, so I could hold onto them for a few days if I wanted to. In general, with risky stocks I'll only trade their options rather than the underlying, to limit my potential loss. One time I violated my own rules and daytraded RFX stock because of the activity it was getting premarket. I bought around $7K worth... and then it was halted, and when it reopened the next week it gapped down 99%.
Ouch.. 99% gap-down.. That's pretty rare though, to have a stock halted mid-day then lose all it's value when it re-opens, so usually that shouldn't even be a consideration.
yeah, but all you need is one cancel to make routing there worth it... a lot of the time I'll cancel 3 or 4 times to get the best price... - mnx
A lot of discussion on how to make your cancelations worth it, but no mention of the merits of canceling in the first place. Unless you are hedging greek exposure instantaneously upon getting filled or playing a market maker, i never understood the premise behind canceling an order 100 times. When you place your limit order, you have made the decision to be in the trade at that price and time, a 2 tick movement shouldn't make you change your mind. It's analogous to getting a fill as the market moves 2 ticks or better yet, its analogous to having a stop order on your option trade at 2 ticks or whatever the distance that caused the cancel. What if your cancel caused you to miss the trade? Hell, with some retail brokers you won't even get a cancel confirmation before the market moves. So my question would be why is it that many of you even need to cancel 5 times before finally getting filled?
I totally agree with rallymode. Before you ever place your orders on a trade, you should already know 3 things: 1: Buy Limit. 2: Sell Limit. 3: Stop Limit. You can use an I.B. Bracket order (automated complex order) which will execute all three orders automatically for you. You simply fill in the 3 numbers on the bracket order and click "transmit," and then turn off the trade station and go do something else (besides interferring with the trade process and racking up cancellation and change fees). Its the single best tool for learning proper trade discipline.