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Up to October 31st, I sold 283 options in 67 trades ( 86% winners). I had a 75% annualized return.
Major losses in soybeans and natural gas. I was able to stick to 100% maximum loss in most of my trades. Basically I sell OTM calls at 90 days or more.
At the moment I am out of the grains market because of the low premium.
Well this is the final straw. OX increased their markup on KC margins to 50%!
I am pulling the majority of my money out of OX.
ICE decreased margins on Thursday by 38% but for some reason OX thought that was too low so they jacked up their markup from 20% to 50%. Yet on SB where margin is only $825 for a futures OX has no markup.
I knew Schwab would ruin a good thing. It usually happens when a large corporation buys a smaller company.
I read in previous posts that you're trying out Decarley brokerage for your option selling portfolio. It would be marvellous if you could share with us how you find it. I'm looking to move my option selling book from OX too.
Interactive Brokers are out because of their ridiculous margins for FOPs. There aren't that many brokerages willing to accept clients from overseas (Great Britain) so my choice is limited. Much obliged for anything you can tell us!
I have been talking with them. I think DeCarley is a good option. I just need to find a good platform to use with them. I am trying out a Demo with the Zaner360 right now. I have not liked it so far but I am just getting into it.
Maybe it is just this demo software but I can't even get CL and NG quotes to show up properly. CLTG4 and NGTF4 just show up as 0.0000. I am see ESZ3 and ZBZ3 fine with live data. I can pull up the option chains for those. I placed a couple of ES and ZN option orders just fine. I don't like that I can't see the margin required. It seems extremely difficult to calculate any ROI. I can't find the deltas anywhere.
It is very customizable. Maybe I just have to do some more digging.
The symbol for electronic Feb CL is GCLG4. The energies and metals you put a G before the rest of the symbol.
ICE symbols are a little different. Mar KC is KC-MH4. You need the -M in between the symbol and the month.
Coffee options are like this OKC-MF4 C2 for 200 mar call.
Oil options are like this OCLF4 P95 for Jan 95 put.
The letter O goes before the option symbol.
Under tools in the toolbar is symbol lookup. Type in the name of the commodity, ie coffee, to get the symbol.
I have the commodity futures in the Quote panel. I then click on the futures contract and then click on Find Option Chain which I added to the toolbar of the Quote frame. You then have to change the range from Near to Out of the money to see the options we sell.
For a contract like ESH4 that has multiple option months under it you change the Expiration box on the Option Chain frame.
I don't think deltas are available on this platform.
What I find is that there is always something missing every platform. But there are also some things that are on one platform that you can't get anywhere else.
According to Carley the best way to get the correct quotes pulled up is to type in the product you want rather than the symbol. For example type in Soybeans or Crude Oil. The symbology for the Zaner OEC platform is not very intuitive.
As I mentioned on an earlier page the pros of DeCarley are the customer service from someone who knows a lot about the way we trade and the margins at SPAN rates.
The only negatives are that the learning curve for the platform is higher.