Block Trade

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…

This is basically a big change in Implied Volatility [IV]. IV gaps higher when the market expects the underlying Stock/ETF to make a big move in the short term. IV can gap lower when an important event, like an earnings report, has passed. The big gap up in the IV can cause the premium of…

A delayed start option is an option that does not have an exercise price when first introduced for trading but instead has an exercise price setting formula pursuant to which the exercise price will be fixed on a specified future date. 

Tracking Options Flow can be very useful if you know how to take advantage of it. It basically allows you to see what the big traders are doing in real time.  The common thinking is that  these big traders know something that others don’t and are taking a position in anticipation of a move. However,…

A closing purchase is an order that you place to offset an existing short position. For example, If you sell a call option to open a new position, you would then need to offset or close that position with a closing order to buy. In other words, you would buy-to-close.

This is the combination of a Bull Put Spread and a Bear Call Spread. The trade is created by selling a Put and buying a lower strike price Put and also selling a Call and buying a Call with a higher strike price. The short options have consecutive strike prices (short strangle).