lol. picking up pennies in front of steam rollers..so far off base. i did this trade when only monthlies in the big sp500. once a month i made 2500 to 5000 on expiration day..always. never had a blow up. i quit doing it after ootions were being traded electrónically. my floor brokers were good at calling me when they had a customer who wanted to cover there short ootions just before expiration. i would sell them and hold for 4 or 5 hours until they went CAB. cabinent value. i could trust my floor guys. and they got 50 to 100 trades from me that day
As an aside, I've seen two comments now alluding to this "pennies in front of steamroller thing" in this thread. I just don't get it. I think it is a bad analogy. If you can't escape the path of something that moves 1 mile per hour, while you can walk 3 miles per hour, then, um...yeah. Sorry about that all, back to your crazy options stuff. Teehee.
Why wouldn't you just use SPX options? Cash settled so no delivery risk, you can trade them anywhere up to the close on expiration.
It seems the after 1 pm on expiry date issue is broker related only, not sure it’s specific to SPY itself. SPY is ideal because it has daily options M, W, F. And is 1/10 the capital, and each contract being 100 units that makes a difference being able to hedge the positions with option contracts. I noticed an XSP symbol, but I don’t think you can buy underlying XSP, as it looks like it is for options purposes only. Please correct me where I’m wrong on any of these statements. Thanks.
SPX also has M, W, and F daily options. XSP is a mini version of SPX that is 1/10 the size, I don't trade it so I don't know about volume but since it's virtually frictionless to hedge between it and SPX it shouldn't ever diverge enough to matter. And its cash settled so you can trade to the last minute. Pretty much solves all your issues right there!
For capital purposes, it needs to be a one of the 1/10 of the S&P index type vehicles. So that leaves SPY, XSP, and I believe the e-mini. I’m not yet familiar enough with e-mini as it it future related, and I still need to continue researching how the contracts work and when/how they roll over to future quarters. Doesn’t look like you can buy and hold/trade XSP itself, so that eliminates it. I think I’m still pointing to SPY...
I'm confused, you asked about trading options, no? You do understand that you can interchangeably use XSP options to hedge a SPY underlying, they have a correlation of 1? Unless you want to actually deliver SPY underlying into an options contract when it expires. If that's the case, the problem you brought up is a moot point, anyone will let you trade SPY options to close if you have the equivalent SPY in your account. It's really unclear what your asking here, so virtually impossible for anyone to help you.
My apologies, the options would be utilized only to hedge against daytrading activities that go against me during the day. The vehicle I intended to daytrade is the SPY, but now considering other alternatives if they would suit better. So the original problem was that the current discount brokers I utilize won’t allow new “opening” option positions on same day as expiry, so I can’t hedge remaining of day... so looking for low commissions broker that allows opening option positions all day during expiration day.
So your broker won't allow you to buy 1 SPY put option if you own 100 shares of SPY? Which broker is that?
Robinhood doesn’t even show any of the same day expirations on their platform, and EOption disallows any “to open” such trades after 1 pm....