Automatic Exercise

This is a spread strategy that involves selling options and buying a greater number of out-of-the-money options. Backspreads are often in a ratio of 1 to-2 or 2-to-3 and most traders use them because they work well when there is an increase in market volatility especially when they think the market is about to move…

The Thinkorswim platform can be a bit intimidating and hard to navigate especially if the only other platform you have known is something like Robinhood or one of those plain vanilla tools.  But Thinkorswim is like a Swiss army knife of trading and is really a powerful platform once you learn your way around it.  In…

These are the Options with the most time left until expiration. Or, simply, the most distant expiration months. As you can see in the image below, the Jan 2024 and the Jun 2024 expiration would be considered the “back months” because they have 570 and 724 days to expiration, respectively.

No.  Investors look to the confirmations and statements that they receive from their brokerage firms to confirm their positions as option holders or writers. An option holder looks to the system created by OCC’s rules, rather than to any particular option writer, for performance of the option he owns. Similarly, option writers must perform their…

This is a measure of a stock’s volatility relative to the S&P 500 Index. High Beta stocks have high volatility. Stocks that have a beta reading of 1.00 or greater tend to move faster or are more volatile than the S&P index. And stocks that have a beta less than 1.00 tend to move slower…

This is an order that you would place to offset an existing long position. For example, If you buy a call option to open a new position, you would then need to offset or close that position with a closing order. This is an order to sell-to-close.