Excellent liquidity on the new emini Dow options. Bid/ask spreads should be narrower though (average 6 - 9 tics on atm's). Let's hope for the best.
trades on the eCBOT, details are here: http://www.cbot.com/cbot/pub/cont_detail/1,3206,1679+12232,00.html
find quotes , open interest, volume for options on the website. Could you post a link to that? Thanks
Any idea when that will be. I see futures offered on the IB site, but the only futures opts were on the 30yr. Are the YM futures options traded electronically? I would trade the YM futures options if IB offered them....would be a nice hedge for my SPX stuff.
1) Mini-sized Dow options (OYM). I hope that we can trade them soon with IB. How about next week ? I get quotes and tried to trade them, but no success (retail account). TWS tells me that I need "trading permission" (... which I already have, so what ?). 2) You cannot trade those T-bond options (OZB) (although mentioned on IB´s website) as a retail customer. I was told that they are for "institutional accounts" only.
It is a sad thing that we, in the US, have been forced to tolerate wide bid/ask spreads (that's how the system works). E.g. the bid/ask spreads yesterday (YM) were between 4 - 7% wide all day long (March at-the-money). Equity SPX options stay 5 - 10% wide. If you look around overseas, you'll see how a real options market should look like (we are talking about very narrow spreads AND instantenious electronic execution - what you see it what you get - at once!). Look at for example the Amsterdam market: http://www.aex.nl/aex.asp?taal=en , click Market Information, Options Market, check All Series, go to Index Options, choose AEX Index and you'll see their market data. Scroll down to find the March at-the-money (360) contracts. You'll see that at any time, their bid/ask spread is around 1.5-2% - all the time. No "American-style" 8-10% wide spreads here! They have a lot of marketmakers - and their job is to keep the spreads reasonable (by their standards). Would not it be nice to have something similar in the US?