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Here is @cwelsh shares his experience of trading big volume in a fund: Open interest and volume, almost completely, are completely irrelevant. This has been the single biggest surprise. I have traded hundreds of contracts where I was the ONLY volume with zero issues. The bigger deal is the spread. If there is a two cent spread, I typically can get my order easily filled. If there's a $4.00 spread (e.g. PCLN), I get creamed. The PCLN trade took HOURS to get filled, and was filled 1-2 contracts at a time, sometimes as many as 5. Getting out was a nightmare and I had to leg out individually at bad prices. By and large now I'm planning on avoiding the big spreads. That's unfortunate because those spreads allow smaller traders (5 contracts or less) to snipe away and get great fills; Option pricing systems are NOT efficient or fair. There is no "queue." In other words if I put an order in for 100 contracts of the $50 straddle on stock ABC at $1.00 and five minutes later you do the same thing at $1.00 you might get filled first. There is no FIFO or LIFO system. This means its also possible that I have an order for $1.00 and you do for $0.99 and the price moves and you get a fill but I don't -- even though I offered more. This happens on HIGH volume options because there essentially is just a screen the market makers look at, and if my order is buried, they can miss it. I have seen this happen when I had multiple orders in trying to push the price down. E.g. I wanted a $1.00 fill for 900 contracts, so I put in orders at $1.00 at $0.99 and $0.98 -- for 900 contracts each (with a cancel order in for as soon as I get 100 contracts filled). My theory was to drive the price down, or make it look like there was demand to push the price down so I could get the strike I wanted. Imagine my surprise when the $0.99 got filled, but not the $1.00. This also means it makes sense on higher volume stocks to "refresh" your order by resubmitting it. There have been dozens of times I've had an order sitting for an hour, I cancel and replace and its instantly filled at the same price. "Smart" routing is sometimes not that smart too. This is because when I submit my $1.00 order, it might be routed to the CBOE because CBOE has the best price at $1.03 currently. But over the next five minutes another exchange might become the best priced one -- my order won't necessarily be moved to the better exchange because it's already on one. Another reason to resubmit. Lastly, Smart routing, DESPITE what you've been told, does not cross exchange map. In other words, if you have an order for $1.00 on a straddle and there is one exchange that has the put for $0.50 and the call for $0.51 and a separate exchange that has the put for $0.51 and the call for $0.50, the software will NOT split your order between the two exchanges so as to pick off the better priced option off each. This is another reason you can have a straddle priced at the natural price, but not get a fill -- the natural price is not from one exchange, rather multiples.