I took a look at the LiveVol website. First off I am less than impressed when any outfit is not transparent about pricing. If I go to the sign up page for Pro then I see it is $250/mth. LiveVol excel details the 2 subscriptions but has no pricing. As it pulls data from Pro I would guess it is an additional cost, so we are talking >250/mth if excel is desired. A company that leaves its prospective customers to guess like this is not worthy of respect. The X package requires a brokerage account. I am picky about who I send money to so that is out. 250/mth is 3K a year. On a 50K account that is 6%. At this stage frankly I have no idea what sort of return to expect from options trading. As a directional swing trader profit:risk of 2:1 was not terribly impressive for me. Things became interesting at 3:1 or 5:1, that way even with a win rate below 50% I could make good money, useful when you don't have nice trends to ride and you don't want to be 100% in all the time. I see from limited experience modelling trades in Hoadley that 1:1 seems to be the norm around 30 days out (if taken to expiration) so perhaps early closure to get a better R:R would be in order. Until I have a clearer idea of what sort of R:R I am dealing with, I would not pay 250/mth. Also, I don't see any point in having an execution platform as I can use TWS. When I started trading some years back I paid about $450 for Metastock EOD charting, plus the monthly subs for data. I currently pay $45/mth for Sierra Charts. Until I know more about options those are ballpark numbers I would be comfortable with, taking the view if options trading does not work out then there is not too much lost. No simple answer I'm afraid as it's all about the money. How much can be made, what percentage of that will tools and support services take away and does the benefit of the tools justify that percentage.
Do those numbers correspond to fixed holding periods or to stops? If stops, what are the holding times?
A mix actually. I'll try and summarise. If the trade did not move in a week, I cut it. I scaled in as follows; Stop usually 1.5 to 2 ATR. A third on entry, another third on price moving 1 ATR in my favour with the original stop moved up 1 ATR and the same again with a further move in my favour. If I felt good about the trade I would do half and half. I would trail the stop until taken out, only closing if I made better than 25% though even then I usually just tightened to 1 ATR in case the move still had legs. I know the theoretical math about going all in being better, but by doing this my losses were always small and my wins big. This has always been the most important thing to me, not some theoretical road to riches.
Very interesting! Thanks. Do you have a link/etc to the math mentioned below. I think you are right, and my curiosity for the math is mainly to see what is hidden that may not be suitable to all people.
There were a couple of threads on ET which discussed this in detail but I did not save the links. You could try searching.
Makes me feel that someone should start a business that would do something along these lines for retail or semi-retail traders. I personally feel that a subscription to a service that has these features (I am not impressed with LiveVol either) should cost $50/month at most.
I agree that would be good, but perhaps we are in a minority. For me it's all about the money. There is a school of thought that you must be willing to spend money to make money so you see stuff like brokers data is crap, it has to be DTN.IQ feed, at least 2 computers, redundant Internet connection and at least 6 monitors. After that then OK, let's see how much we can make with our 20K account. Those folks may pay the 250/mth. I'm cheap. Yeah if I'm trading a million dollar account I would hire a cook and a maid so I don't have to do that stuff and have more time to work, but right now I'll manage.
Here is another interesting possibility: OpenGamma http://www.opengamma.com/ I am not sure yet whether this is suitable for use without commercial components but am looking into it. It support Excel or R. Personally I would use R.
Check out xlq website, the guy (leo) is super cool, with td Ameritrade or a couple other you can get Greeks