Expanded Trading Hours for SPX & VIX in Q3 http://www.cboeoptionshub.com/2014/02/17/expanded-trading-hours-spx-viv-q3/ 1245
Starting soon. SPX AND VIX OPTIONS. CBOE plans to launch Extended Trading Hours for options on both the S&P 500 and the VIX indexes on Tuesday, October 21, 2014, contingent upon completion of systems enhancements and SEC approval.
Man I really hope they do afterhours options trading across the board, EXCEPT opex date that should close trading at 4:00EST like it is now. But maybe this throws the markets off. Maybe trading normal hours only is the way to go for options. I don't know. But there is a lot of headline risks not being able to trade options after hours. Say you are long stock and have sold covered calls before that will expire worthless. So you let it expire worthless without closing it, since the best closing bid is $0.25 and not $0.01 due to a stub quote. So you sell another call at a later calender, leaving the one covered to expire worthless over the weekend. And market closes, the company announces a headline at 4:05EST after hours, maybe a takeover bid, and stock gaps past your 2nd naked call strike. So now, from taking a bullish view, to being short the stock and losing money. You can adjust by buying the underlying in the after hours, but its not efficient. Sometimes you have more adjustment strategies with options.
Keep in mind this is just for proprietary CBOE products, not equity options in general. The latter would require a much larger market-wide reform and would involve all of the equity option exchanges, not just the CBOE.