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Mukundaa, One way to play the market you mention that has worked for me is with a broken wing put butterfly with the wide wing to the downside. Make it wide enough so you take in an initial credit. Then if market goes up you keep your credit, and if IV drops fast you can remove the trade early for a profit. If it stays neutral and you hold close to expiration,you can really win when it's in the thorax of the butterfly. Tim

I've just started using TOS and you can get very fine resolution option pricing using OnDemand (orange tab in upper right). Basically a DVR of the market. Main downside is it doesn't seem to calculate greeks but easy enough using an option pricing model. I'm happy. The position tracking is a nice feature of ONE, but for my option trading account size ONE is a bit expensive.

4REAL, Like you, I use a spreadsheet as I haven't found anything that doesn't cost significant money. I made a GoogleDocs spreadsheet with separate tabs for straddles, calendars, and condors. I have an adjustment column for each, and I just place the credit/debit and a comment describing the adjustment in the cell. It's not that pretty, but for tracking live trades you can use the GoogleFinance function to track the price of the underlying real time and I have alerts to let me know when say the underlying is more than a certain % away from the strike price of a calendar. On the downside of GoogleDocs, I started this in June, and I'm noticing that as more and more trades are added, it gets slower and slower to refresh after I make updates to cells. I may have to copy closed trades offline to lean it out again. I'm also wary of the privacy of Google, but I don't keep any personal information in there besides the trade data. I too would be interested in what other members might be using. Tim

I actually applaud him for removing the risk yesterday for 0.49 and not trying to squeak out the last dime with four days to go. Nice trade.

Email is my primary mode for intraday updates on SO. If it were possible, I would happily subscribe to all sub forum posts in "Earnings Trades Discussions" without having to manually hit follow on each thread. I end up hitting follow on all of them anyway, and miss some discussions on ones I don't. BTW, I have seen this functionality on other forums, the main one I make use of it on is Tradestation user forums where I want to be aware of all posts for OptionStation Pro without having to log on. Tim

Hi PC, I've made it through all of the advanced lectures and about half of the basic / intermediate lectures. The lectures run between 1.5 to 2 hours, and are VERY comprehensive about the details of how options work. One caveat is that they appear to be 3-4 years old so weekly options are not covered. He also isn't shy about sharing his opinions about fundamental analysis (not a huge fan lol) so that might upset some people. I'd say for members of the SO service, the advanced set is all you'd need and well worth it. There are two lectures dedicated to trading volatility, in fact, he is a huge fan of the type of straddle trades we just did in MSFT and INTC. He advises these whenever volatility is near 52 week lows as a near sure-thing strategy by either vol increase or underlying movement. Hope this is helpful. Tim

One more thing - double check that the option you're selling is the front month of the spread.

OK, I bit the bullet. Will report back my thoughts when I get through the 25 hours of videos

I'm curious to see if anyone has ever seen the 16 video home study course on option trading by Larry McMillan's company. I got an offer today to purchase it for $99 (48 hours only lol!) and some of the advanced sessions look interesting on trading volatility. I've attended a few webinars with Larry and have found him to be a very good instructor. I'm curious if what's included in this set would even be remotely as good as the live education in SteadyOptions. Opinions? Thanks, Tim http://www.optionstrategist.com/products/16-seminar-home-study-course-video-downloads

I put a small position on PETM late yesterday - bought the Mar/Apr 67.5 call spreads for $.42, sold for $.57 at the open (35% gain). I realize this was a gamble that worked out as the stock didn't move and it was commissions consuming (about 14% of my profits). Thanks for the analysis and the strategy being discussed. Tim

Chris, I noticed with today's roll the margin requirement is getting quite high (I'm doing this in an IRA so it's a bit of a sting on free cash). Are you considering rolling the long up and out soon? FYI, I'm happy that the trade is profitable along with the downside protection we've had all along - very well done so far. Thanks, Tim

For those that bought back shorts, what strike/expiration do you plan to sell? $164 aug 30? Tim

I couldn't bring myself to take off all of them. Bought back half and rolling the dice. Tim

I'm still going round and round about how this trade works, so I did a checkpoint today. I'm doing a 20 long / 16 short ratio mostly following Chris' moves (except I rolled the longs up once early from 158 to 162, probably stupid move). Here's currently where the trade is at: Original long cost (including roll up from 158 to 162): -$19,600 Current value of long puts: $9580 Total income from selling 16 weekly shorts per Chris' moves: $7,717 Current unrealized loss: -$2,303 I am meeting the 5% per week goal though on selling the shorts, so I'm trying to ignore this paper loss. I'm worried about the weeks likely to come when the shorts lose big. The theory is the longs will gain more than the shorts lose due to the ratio and higher vega on the longs, correct?

Chris, I'm starting to get a grasp of this concept but I'm confused by your answer to #3 in bold below. Are you saying we should remove the ratio when we are selling shorts ITM? Did you mean to say long strikes? Thanks, Tim