tl;dr: Good software with very intuitive UI, hamstrung by terrible sales model that makes it difficult to fit in anywhere. Note when I talk about price I fall into the non-professional pricing. I've been investigating various options software in an attempt to find something that meets my needs. What I'm looking for is the following: Rapid access to data of bid, ask, theoretical value, IV, greeks, etc for spreads. This is extremely basic stuff but you'd be surprised how much software falls down when it comes to doing this for spreads as opposed to individual options. Quickly able to sort and compare spreads. Ability to input own option price for spreads. Risk projection (profit/loss, essentially) for arbitrary spreads, at arbitrary dates in the future, for arbitrary values of the underlying, and arbitrary changes in volatility. Ability to compare risk projections of the above. Send selected spreads for execution. On all but the last point, Options Analytix delivers nicely. Now, none of these requirements are particularly difficult to code. All the formulas and equations are very well studied and understood. What makes Options Analytix really good is how damn user-friendly the whole package is. If you are at all familiar with how to use a computer, you won't need any help files or videos. Everything is very obvious. Select your underlying, (optionally) select a spread, right-click on it and view the risk graph or future projection. Then tweak the parameters until you have the information you need. It really is extremely easy and my metaphorical hat is off to the dynamictrend.com guys for focusing hard on exposing a solid UI. Too much software, not just in the trading business, has a UI that makes it harder to use the program rather than easier. Options Analytix comes with eight distinct pieces, each of which conveniently operates in a new window. I'll go through each piece. Chart: Your basic chart of the underlying or option. Woohoo. Nothing mind-blowing here, but it's not something that needs to be mind-blowing. There's a bunch of technical indicators you can add to it if you care about that sort of thing. I don't. Matrix: This is a market scanner. If you're at all any good at writing SQL queries or a logic programming language like Prolog this sort of thing will not impress you. It just lets you scan to see if stocks or options fit some technical indicator. It's not SQL and it's not Prolog so as far as I'm concerned it's meh. Chain: Basic readable option chain. Can create spreads from here. Spread: Now we start getting into the good stuff. Select underlying, choose starting strike, choose distance and checkbox some spread choices. It will load all of them up and populate the data of interest (bid, ask, iv, greeks, risk profile, credit/debit) in spreadsheet form for quick comparison. Right click on any spread to get to the Risk or Project windows. Risk: Here's where you can see the profit/loss characteristics of your spread. This is by far the most pleasant software I've ever worked with for this. You can input your own price level (not forced to use the bid or ask). Examine what the theoretical value will look like at any future day, not just certain days some software arbitrarily restricts you to. Adjust volatility or interest rate to any level (though the latter may be less obvious for those of us who grew up in ZIRP, lol). You can compare multiple spreads with all of the above options. You can also examine volatility for individual legs, compare different measures of IV and HV, etc. All wrapped up into one extremely easy to use and easy to read interface. This is a real gem. All trading software should look like this. Skew: Display volatility/delta/theta skew. If you've ever used Livevol X, it's pretty similar. View one dependent variable in 2d, or both in 3d. Nothing mind-blowing here, but it works well and is pleasant to use. Decay: A chart that shows how option value or any of the greeks will change over time until expiration. This is useful, but not as good as it could be. This should be a 3d chart that shows response to both important variables: time and underlying. Not really sure why it's not, as they clearly have the tech already available to do good-looking 3d charts. It also calculates a "sweet spot" of when to buy the option to get maximum theta decay. I do not know how they do this calculation though, so I cannot say whether it is bogus or not. Seems like they might be finding inflection points (zeros of the 2nd derivative like you've done in your calculus class) but it's hard to tell from the few graphs I've looked at. Projection: The dynamictrend guys have broken their arms patting themselves on the back for this feature. This is another example of excellent UI. This is another way to examine risk. There are three charts, stacked on top of the other. On the top is projected P&L / spread value / greek value. Under that is the projected underlying. And finally on the bottom is the projected IV. The x-axis of this chart is date. On the left-hand side of the charts is what all the values were in the past. On the right-hand side is a straight blue line. At any point on the blue line, you can drag it up or down to adjust underlying price or implied volatility at that date. The result of these changes will then appear in the top chart. This feature is extremely neat and a triumph of excellent UI design. It's a very intuitive way to look at risk, even if I don't favor it myself (I prefer the regular old risk graph mentioned before). I also like how it treats the greeks as the continuous variables that they are. They also blare "patent pending" everywhere. I'm not entirely sure what's patentable about taking standard equations and slapping a neat UI on top, but whatever. Don't strain your programming hands trying to pat yourselves on the back, guys. Overall: From a features perspective, this is highly polished software that was an absolute pleasure to use. But is it a no-brainer? Absolutely not. The eSignal sales model makes absolutely no sense for the customer. I'm sure it makes perfect sense for eSignal since with every bundled extra you don't want they make more money, but personally being on the side of the customer I hate this. Here's the deal: I'm not just in the market for an options analysis platform, I also need an execution platform. So naturally, I asked the sales rep who I got this trial from about eSignal. They don't cut you any sort of break if you buy the both of them together. The all-in price for both eSignal and Options Analytix is roughly $420/month. That is flipping insane (and from my billing statement doesn't even include l2 data!). If you need a platform for both execution and options analysis, you can get Silexx OEMS professional for less than that over at Lightspeed. Including l2 data. Send a message to Robert Morse on these forums, he'll hook you up. This price comes from the fact that they sell you things you don't want. They have in the past claimed to be a data company and not a software company. That's great but you can't buy the data without buying the software, and you can't buy the software without buying the data. So you'll pay out the nose because of the bundling. I don't care about the data at all and I get it elsewhere, all I want is the platform! That price is simply way too high to justify paying when you can have other, arguably better platforms (including data) for less. If all you need is an options analysis platform, I suppose you could justify it. While $180/month seems steep (note that a whopping $40 of that is data, not even l2 data, just plain old l1 data), it is a really slick and well-designed program. But if you're like me and need both an analysis platform and execution platform, it just doesn't fit. Random other notes: I ran into a nasty bug while testing this out. I was comparing spreads and the options price changed while I was doing it. This change never propagated through Options Analytix, leaving me with stale data. When I entered the spread into my broker to purchase I used a limit price based on the old, stale prices. This bug cost me about what this software costs per month. There's no API, so you can't enhance the software in any way. eSignal has an API but its support seems...lacking. It's based on Javascript 1.5 (!), which is now sixteen years old and missing pretty much everything from the past sixteen years that made Javascript a usable language. Come on guys, I'm not even asking for ES6 here. Even ES5 (December 2009) would be nice. Going by the ancient Javascript support I can only assume this API is abandoned. There's no feature to export to Excel. For something that fits so obviously into spreadsheet form, that seems like a glaring omission.
Small addendum to this review: the P&L calculations do not handle diagonal spreads correctly with the defaults where the long option is farther dated than the short option. The P&L listed forgets that the long option still has value, and it's not just there for a hedge. To fix this, you have to change the volatility calculation from "Net Spread" to "Individual Legs".