And now, a few hours later with price flat, we can see the decay effect (theta) on option values. The good thing about it is that even if the price has some move up or down, it still ends up in profit. It works most of the time, and an account gain of percent or two per trade adds up. The downside to this strategy is that a large directional move is theoretically infinite, leading to unlimited loss. The other thing is that it requires a high amount of buying power relative to reward.
And now towards the end of the day, we can see that price still being flat, both the long and short position have decayed tremendously, leaving little extrinsic value.
Good question. It's very simple. Let's say an ATM (at-the-money) option which expires that day is worth ~$500 at the beginning of the day. In has 0 intrinsic value, because it is not ITM. Half the day goes by and half the value decays (Pricing dynamics don't work like that, but you get the point). So the price must move ITM enough to overcome that amount, not merely getting ITM. This $500 amount is called premium. This premium value is determined by how close it is to the strike, how much time you have on it, Implied Vol (expected move), etc. If a stock is expected to move a lot, the premium will be high.
Looking through C2's supported brokers, TW isn't on there. This means that if I were to use C2, I would have to manually input orders via the simulator rather than my real orders automatically being inputted. This would cause may problems, including time delay, slippage, inefficiency, and others. For example, the JD long I made on Wednesday was 1 candle from the low; I entered on the subsequent candle which promptly ripped upwards. This happens a fair few times, and entering a real trade followed by a call entry will cause a statistically significant difference. Not only that, but it will certainly lose out on a technical property which allows me to barely get out at breakevens. For example, the recent UAL trade. Although it was a loss, the price barely returned to entry the day after, as was predicted by the system; I just didn't want to hold, although the technical system said to. This is because I use more leverage. From a purely technical standpoint, however, the time and price components said to hold, aka market flip theory. I considered teaming up with a programmer type. A strategy like this very easily lends itself to systematic trading. I'm missing up on lots of great opportunities. It would potentially uncover some consistent data as well as interesting market phenomena I'm sure. We'll see.