Humble

I assume you are talking about a theory that the stock will be trading at the strike of the highest OI? This might be true for many stocks, but when earnings are involved, I believe the rules are different. The stock price is impacted more by earnings and it's more difficult to manipulate.

I got the following email today from tastytrade: "We Put The Nail In The Coffin On "Buying Premium Prior To Earnings" "We look at whether or not you could make money on the implied volatility expansion leading up to an earnings announcement." Since buying pre-earnings straddles is one of our key strategies, I went to watch the segment. Click here to view the article

Option trading is not something you want to do if you just fell off the turnip truck. But when used properly, options allow investors to gain better control over the risks and rewards depending on their forecast for the stock. No matter if your forecast is bullish, bearish or neutral there’s an option strategy that can be profitable if your outlook is correct. I came across an excellent post from Brian Overby, Senior Options Analyst at TRADEKING. He outlines the top 10 mistakes that new options traders make. Here are the highlights: Click here to view the article

Over the last few years, Tesla used to report earnings during the first week of the second month of the earnings cycle (February, May, August and November). This cycle was expected to be no different. However, yesterday Tesla surprised the trading community and announced that they will report earnings on Thursday, July 31. What does it mean for the options traders? Click here to view the article

I'm creating this topic to discuss the general market, macro trends etc. Please share your thoughts here.

Bret, did you re-enter it? The stock moved since your post, so depending on timing, I'm curious how well did it hold value.

I'm starting this topi to post links to some useful webinars that are relevant to strategies we use. The pre-ER straddle by OptionSlam

It might still be cheap, but definitely not screaming cheap. I think it can should make money if the stock doesn't move more than ~10 points.

The call calendar is cheap because there is a dividend between July and August. The put calendar is around 1.60.

Looks good to me.. As a side note, I hope you are not placing the order at the ask of 8.70 - the mid is 8.45 now, you should be able to get it around 8.50. Level 3 should be sufficient.

In my opinion, there are three main things you should look when selecting a broker: commissions, execution and platform. Better commissions will have a dramatic impact on your long term performance. Tools etc. you can can somewhere else.

This is the most dumb excuse I have ever heard. In terms of risk, American calendars are much riskier because the short options can be assigned before expiration. On expiration, it's the same risk because American short options will be assigned the stock if expired ITM. IB has a good solution: they automatically close the trade if the short options are ITM 15 minutes before the close. We will never hold that long anyway, so there is absolutely no assignment risk. If e-trade still insist not to allow you to do that and you want to participate in RUT trades, I suggest changing brokers. Take a look on this discussion:http://steadyoptions.com/forum/topic/5-brokers-and-commissions/

Making our chatroom more active is really up to us.. I'm all for it, and will try to respond to any questions in a timely matter.

I can tell you that having few trades like this one was one of the main reasons why I completely stopped trading stocks. The "cannot go any lower" mentality can do real damage to your trading account.

There are a lot of options. If you believe there will be a quick bounce, then long call is a better choice. If you are ready to give up some of the upside potential for some downside protection, you can go with something like 16/18 spread. Then if SLV stays above 18 by August, you still get around 40% return (but you need to wait almost till expiration to realize that return). But you will have protection down to ~17.50. And you can buy back the short call if SLV goes down and wait for a bounce.

Thanks for sharing Chris - and like Chris mentioned, it is posted in directional and speculative trades forum for a reason. Since those calls have a delta of 0.90, it is a pure leveraged bet. If you want to be more conservative, you can do a spread instead.

I must say this is very unusual. I'm with IB for almost 10 years, never had any issues. But at least they admit the problem which is a good thing. From what I hear about IB, their customer support can be very stubborn.