verbotenstylen

Yes, same here. Very slow, the platform keeps freezing. Restarting didn't help. I just emailed support but sounds like it's their issue.

One point is that by selling a lower strike put you are capping your potential gains, both via direction and IV. Closing and buying a lower strike keeps your upside unlimited. I'm not saying one is always better than the other, just that the trade-off is real.

Gotcha, thanks. There's a note saying that brokerage has moved to Lightspeed, then when I go to that site I can see LVX rolled into their platform lineup. It looks like Lightspeed has even lower commissions at $0.60 (less for active traders) but with different minimums per order depending on the platform. Also $200/mo fee for LVX, less commissions "until 12/31/15," which tells me that they will probably try and increase the fee after that if I had to guess. Given the uncertainty of what's going on, I'm probably going to lean towards IB. Will give it a couple months though.

Thanks Tim, really appreciate the input. I just looked at livevol's site, and it appears that there is no brokerage arm shown anymore, unless I'm missing it. You can get LivevolX for $500/mo, but there's no offer of having it included for free for opening a brokerage account through them. Perhaps this has to do with your drawback #3 above? Maybe I just caught them in some sort of transitional period.

luxmon, what do you think of LiveVol X? I was thinking of moving over to them from TOS. I see they offer $0.65/contract commissions, no ticket. Their analysis software seems top of the line.

Did you also remember to knock down the vol of the vert spreads as well? That would make a big difference in the p/l after the vol crush.