Just do a Finance.Yahoo.com search I suppose. Or go to Ivolatility and search out higher vols for the products that interest you (equities, indexes, etc.). Don
I still like TrackData for much of my research. We have an expensive real time feed, but they offer a really cheap, delayed quote alternative. Something like $10 bucks a month or something, great for research. Don
Very depressing to read this... Anyways, I don't want to derail this thread any more, so I'll shut up.
This is probably the most often misquoted/misused statistic in options. 90% or whatever the exact % may be of options that are held to expiry go out worthless, however that doesn't automatically imply that selling options is advantageous to buying them. What nobody seems to mention when quoting this 90% thing is that the majority of options are closed out prior to expiry, so those 90% represent a much lower fraction, when you consider the total number of options that are in existence at any point in life of a particular contract. In adition, nobody mentions that in order to be among those 90% statistic you need to be able to withstand huge swings in your equity and thus require a very large account relative to your position.
That last paragraph really doesn't seem to go with the 1st 2 paragraphs. It almost seems like someone mixed up 2 different posts from 2 different investors and blended them together, as some sort of joke.
Huh. Well, I don't see the incompatibility of them at all and assure you it's no joke in the slightest. Don't you tend to respect people who capably do things you can't?
Yeah, the 10% you are wrong might be the 13-bagger loss like I had on GOOG the week ended 5/18/2012 . So the 90% rate is useless without putting a context to it. By and large I believe options are fairly priced. You will make no money randomly selling or buying (after costs). The edge is your market experience in knowing what/when to trade.
Of course. Everybody here has the capacity to do things I can't. But I have no intention of trying more complex, more risky, lower probability, or more leveraged trades,... just because I see others doing them. You stated.... "I have awesome respect for anyone who regularly is profitable trading options." Really? Because you should actually save that "awesome respect" for non option traders who are regularly profitable. Making regular profits with options, is a lot easier than making a profit without them. If you don't realize that, you really should be sticking with the more basic option strategies, before moving on to the more complex ones. Just because a trade is more complex, doesn't make it a better trade, or one with a higher probability of being successful. You may have noticed, not many traders tend to share their more complex trades in "real time". There could be a reason for that.