Has anyone ever received a fill on an option spread on GLOBEX? I gave up trying a long time ago and always leg in, but I wonder if this is a problem with my platform. When I send one of these orders, I see it becoming the best bid/ask of the spread but I doesn't trade even if it becomes marketable.
tplast - ditto exactly. I've even watched the quoted bid drop below my LMT price for the spread - I have never ever received a fill on the ES or NQ emini futures options using a GLOBEX spread. It may be specific to this product but who cares really. Just my experience but it works better for me to enter one option at a time during a quiet consolidation period - maybe lunchtime or a weak low vol day. If the damn price stays still then I can test the water, drop it a nickel, and so on. If it's moving all over the place then it's possible to spike and kill my spread all together. For a vertical I just buy the long option, then buy the short option. I don't want to have a naked short for even an instant in case of any freak event. I don't want to buy all 5 long options at once either for the same reason. But since I'm entering during a quiet period I can do this whole thing pretty quickly, one at a time. It will be a major pain in the ass to put on 10 butterflies like this but what the heck what else do I have to do during a trading day? I'd love to hear more on this from anyone using IB. Lotsa luck
I've gotten filled on them, but it's rare. Rare enough that I don't even try any more. Usually when you do get filled, you could have gotten a better deal legging. The answer is to encourage IB to adopt a comparable policy to the SPX. With SMART routing, they will grab the legs for you and fill it at your limit. There are other threads from a few months ago with more about this topic. The core problem is that a spread is marketed as spread - and there aren't that many folks shopping for spreads. If IB would allow their computer to seek the desired spread price by shopping the legs individually (as they do with SPX), then our problem would be solved.