Been using TradeStation for trading options for a little while now and as a charting platform for the most part I am fairly happy with them. I have reached a point though where I am beginning to encounter limitations in the software's abilities to easily work with options. Simple things ...like there is no consistent way to identify the front month options, the current ATM strike or the volume of an individual strike programically... Stupid problems to have I know. I am interested in being able to run various real time calculations on various symbols and their respective strikes, but I have no interest in building an automated system for buying and selling ... just something to help with the math. I have seen Excel, SQL Databases and such floated around and in some ways I like the idea of not being locked into a proprietary niche platform with a small user base for support, but at the same token I am also leery of trying to recreate the wheel from scratch ...my goal is to continue being a trader not necessarily become a programmer. As I begin to explore the available solutions are there any good core components out there to work off of for doing more granular calculations on options ? I would really like to find something that is flexible enough to be able to continue to build on and ideally not have to switch platforms again.
I feel your pain as well . It seems that trading options is less trading more of a data mining/programming exercise. Optionvue has some queries last time I trialed them . However, they are expensive and at a certain point u may find the granularity u seek is just beyond their capability to make or beyond your willingness to pay. There are ways in Excel to get ATM strike. Get stock last price, enter a span level of option per ticker and use round function to get ATM strike. Use roundup/rounddown to get next up or down ATM,etc.
I believe Excel is the middle ground you're looking for. It's very flexible wrt calculations, data mnining, statistics etc, but at the same time much easier to deal with than programming languages like C++ etc.