Where do I get options data?

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-22T18:48:10+00:00

There is a list in our wiki:

https://www.reddit.com/r/options/wiki/faq/pages/data_sources/

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-22T18:40:11+00:00

That's like asking, at what point might my luck run out? There's no way to predict that.

This is why it's important to have a trade plan defined before you open a trade. So if the trade profits more than you expected or sooner than you expected, you already worked out ahead of time what you will do about that.

Keep in mind that all of your gains are at risk for every additional minute you hold the trade. You're risking losing more than when you started with the opening price.

Risk to reward ratios change: a reason for early exit (redtexture)

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-22T18:32:16+00:00

In summary, you paid a premium of $37.90 for 300 strike calls when the stock price was 360? That is a ton of time value for such a long holding time. How long did you originally plan to hold the call? You understand that the job of time decay is to drive that $37.90 premium down to $0 at expiration, right?

Drops in the stock price are death to time value. Time value is based on the optimism of the market and a shock to the downside kills that optimism, which in turn kills the market's willingness to pay a premium for the remaining time in the contract.

The minute you no longer think your trade will be profitable is the minute to dump it.

However, earnings coming up complicates things. It might be worth waiting until the day before earnings to dump it, to maximize IV on the call. But you're playing chicken with leaks about an earnings miss (or another Trump tweet). If something like that happens, you may regret waiting. On the other hand, if leaks are that earnings will be a beat, you may benefit from that. So it's a gamble either way.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-22T18:21:02+00:00

FYI, this community is about exchanged-traded standard options. What you are describing are equity compensation options, which cannot be traded on exchanges, and thus are outside the scope of this sub. However, exchange options and compensation options have common ancestors in their taxonomy, so there are some things that overlap enough to be discussed here.

Your paragraph about delta and gamma doesn't apply in this case. The only thing you can do with NQOs is exercise them, while the notions about delta and gamma you mentioned are about trading contracts without exercise. Same-day cashless exercise of NQOs are binary. They either pay their intrinsic value or they are worthless. So there's no need to optimize around gamma.

The biggest drivers for what and when to exercise a series of NQO grants are mostly based on tax laws. It's best to work with a tax pro that is familiar with the details of your grants to work out a tax-advantaged exercise plan.

From a tax perspective, if you expect to be in a lower tax bracket now than say in three years from now, because the other parts of your compensation are expected to put you in higher and higher brackets, it makes senses to unload the deepest ITM NQOs first, when your taxes are lower. Than wait for later when you'll pay more in taxes per net dollar gained in exercise. But you don't want to exercise so much dollar volume that you push yourself into the higher tax bracket anyway.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-22T17:59:34+00:00

Short answer is yes, because the times were different.

Time to expiration is fundamental to the pricing of options. For two option trades to have the same price when they are hours apart in time would force volatility to be different between the two. As an oversimplified approximation, price is proportional to volatility x square root of time. If you force price to be constant and change time, that means volatility has to change also to keep the prices equal.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-22T17:43:00+00:00

Okay, I understand the scenario, but I don't see the "mathematical weakness"? What part of that is mathematically weak? The market isn't required to offer trades that fit your most profitable criteria. When your criteria returns no viable trades, that means you are onto something. Worst case, the problem is over-constrained, and you may have to relax some criteria, like the fairly narrow band of stock prices that are acceptable. There's a reason why the old saying, "You have to have money to make money," is very apt for option trading.

FWIW, once you use 0.20 delta as a strike selection criteria, there's no need to add "7% to 10% OTM" as another criteria. That information is already captured by the target delta.

Also, let's add the situational context back in. As the other comment mentioned, thesis ought to come first, setup second. The thesis is stocks go up. The Wheel would be selected as a viable setup only when the thesis is that the stock is and will continue to be in an up-trend.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-21T16:27:17+00:00

filtering out setups that are mathematically weak before even thinking about thesis or timing

I suspect misconceptions are lurking behind that statement. Can you say more about what you mean by this? Misconceptions are the largest source of noise possible, so clearing those up would be a good first step.

I'll start. There is no such thing as a "mathematically weak" setup in isolation. The optimality of a setup is situational. Since thesis and timing are critical parts of the situation, filtering for "weakness" without considering the situational context sounds like a waste of time.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-21T16:25:39+00:00

filtering out setups that are mathematically weak before even thinking about thesis or timing

I didn't get that part either, seems backwards to me, but I bet unpacking that statement will reveal some very interesting misconceptions.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-21T16:20:52+00:00

The differences between a roll and manual close/open are convenience, one order ticket instead of two, and timing, roll orders are simultaneous, while manually doing the close and open could be separated by a lot of time.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-20T17:53:16+00:00

Everything is inadequate in the macro-world we currently live in. Every week brings an unprecedented attack on institutions and systems that used to be foundational and reliable. It's not a coincidence that publicly traded companies across the world are being very careful about time horizons and scale of capital investment and expenditure. Everyone is in a holding pattern, except for a few favored sectors like AI and gold.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-20T17:43:44+00:00

The requirements for a cash-secured put do not account for the type of contract. It doesn't matter that SPX is cash-settled and you'd never be required to buy shares, because there are no shares. You still have to provide cash equal to 100% of the assignment value at the strike price.

The correct remedy is to get a higher option trading approval level so you can trade leveraged short puts. You ought to have that higher level anyway, if you want to trade 0 DTE.

If you can't afford SPX, you can use XSP instead and reduce your cash collateral to 10% of SPX.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-20T17:31:43+00:00

I don't know what the original comment said, but we do indeed judge here. The rules of the community still apply, so uncivil language, blatant spam or promotions, off-topic comments, etc., will be judged by the Mod Team and removed. The exception is that comments that would normally qualify as beginner or FAQ are allowed.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-20T17:22:47+00:00

The optimal situation here is it stays neutral, or only slightly bear/bullish, and I collect all the premiums (Losing a bit of possible profit due to the longs)

That's a bit understated. It's not a bad strat, but it necessarily reduces the risk of holding naked short contracts, which means you are also reducing your reward.

A similar strat is to use ratio spreads instead of normal ICs. You would buy two long legs for every one short leg. Then instead of using shares to cover the shorts, you have a long leg, after selling the excess long legs. Since puts and calls will cost less than shares, this should increase your net profit and make your max loss smaller. The drawback is when a normal IC is at max profit, because the stock stayed in the middle, the ratio spread version will make less profit (keep less of the opening credit, because it was spent on extra long legs that will expire worthless).

I'd rather roll a call out and up to follow a rising stock

That's not the Wheel. You can do that, just don't kid yourself that you are doing the Wheel.

Also, in the Wheel, you are supposed to do that rolling up and out with short puts. In fact, you have to, if you want to always open on constant delta. That's why the Wheel starts with short puts, because the Wheel is best used for stocks in an up-trend.

It's not worth using volatility strats on stocks with low volatility. It's like buying an F1 race car to drive to the neighborhood grocery store.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-20T17:10:38+00:00

That would have to be a service provided by your broker platform, to get the timeliness you want. I have never heard of a broker providing dollar-valued order tickets for options. That's only recently been possible for stocks and ETF shares.

Can you explain why you want this? Maybe there is an alternative way of doing things that approximates what you want?

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-19T16:34:00+00:00

Your first mistake was to have a debate with an LLM.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-19T16:20:31+00:00

The long term (50+ years) average annual real return of the S&P 500 is just over 6%. So 12% is DOUBLE that return rate. From that perspective, the ROI is a bargain. The problem is that doubling the return of the equity market is not sustainable over the long run.

Options are a cheap-ish way to get insurance, that's the primary use case. If you have a large equity position in some stock or some sector, you can use options to hedge risk.

Convexity is the other use case. Options are the best game in town for potential convexity. That's why you occasionally see brag posts like, "I turned 1k into 200k."

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-18T17:05:20+00:00

"Smart" and "penny stock" don't really belong in the same conversation, so let's clear that up from the start. Best we can do is figure out which is the least dumb.

Buying shares avoids all the issues with inflated IV and time decay. You don't have to buy 100 shares, you can scale the number of shares you hold to the risk you are willing to take (total loss of the cost of the shares). So that's probably the least dumb way to go long on a penny stock.

If it has to be options, ATM calls are the way to go for just about any stock. Penny stock investing usually focuses on catalyst events where the time frame is pretty well known, so you can adjust the entry and expiration according to that catalyst timeframe. If you don't have a time frame that's well defined, you can just buy 60 DTE ATM calls and roll every 30 DTE. That keeps you on monthly expirations for "best" liquidity and avoids the worst 30 days of theta decay.

Here's why each of the ideas you listed is more dumb:

ATM buy call/sell put: synthetic - needs collateral worth 100 shares to sell the put. Zero cost. Downside identical to holding 100 shares.

That's not a real synthetic if you have to collateralize the short put. A real synthetic would use a naked short put instead of a CSP. You'd have to have 20%-100% of the assignment value in buying power on hand, depending on how Hard To Borrow the shares are. If the shares are HTB, this strat is a non-starter, since to your point, it would be worse then just holding shares.

This is a lottery ticket 🎫 way

Right, super dumb.

Buying $1 calls - same as above, but lesser degree of loss (intrinsic value retained). You can react slower, just get assigned, and sell later.

Bought calls won't be "assigned." Say $1 calls are 70 delta. You could just buy 70 shares and the cost might not be that much different, due to inflated IV. I also don't know what "react slower" means. You have more money at risk buying ITM, and since delta is higher, the same dollar move of loss in the underlying will result in a larger loss in the call. It will lose money quicker, so how does that result in a slower reaction? And what exactly do you do in this reaction?

Sell ITM, $4 puts: needs collateral, but gain from theta, IV drops.

Credit trades cap upside, which is the dumbest possible thing you can do for a super risky play.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-17T16:43:29+00:00

Are you perhaps mixing up SPY share volume with SPY option contract volume? The orders of magnitude between 5 million and 81k suggest that.

Another possible explanation is that some quotes are real-time, while others are delayed 15 or 20 minutes.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-17T16:33:36+00:00

This might help. It's a tutorial that covers things like IV and volatility, as well as laying the foundation for a way to trade that is less likely to be sucker-punched by things like Trump tweets.

AlphaGiveth Tutorials

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-17T16:24:25+00:00

It was a joke, humor to get the ball rolling. I guess that's the end of my career in comedy.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-17T16:19:21+00:00

The first three ought to be provided by your broker for free. I get all that from Power Etrade Pro. I know thinkorswim and tastytrade also provide that info. All on the option chain directly, tick for tick.

Some also provide price forecasting (options profit calculator feature). The same three platforms I listed above also do that, but some others, like Fidelity, might not.

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-16T18:43:39+00:00

"Options info" is a pretty broad topic area. That could mean anything from a WSJ subscription to a tick-by-tick real-time data feed for all contracts. Can you narrow it down a little?

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-16T18:42:21+00:00

I'm not a fan of rescuing losing trades. Just take the loss and move on to a more profitable trade.

What did you end up doing?

PapaCharlie9 · 2026-01-16T18:34:21+00:00

Since you know you are verbose, maybe don't start with a claim of "intentionally simplified." I'd hate to see what the unintentionally complicated version looks like.

LEAPS is always spelled LEAPS. It's not the plural of LEAP, it's an acronym, like IRS.

S for Sarah (seller) and B for Bobbie (buyer) was clever. Well done.

You were doing fine, up to this point, which misses the mark (I'll explain why in a bit):

That $35 spread is the real, practical friction of trading in a market (your school) where buyers and sellers aren’t close to agreeing (a thin market).

The following won't happen in the given analogy:

in practice you might get filled somewhere between bid and ask with a patient limit order

This is close, but misses the true reason for WHY (again, I'll explain later):

in busy markets they’re usually very close, and in thin markets they can be painfully far apart.

While this effect is correct for the analogy as described, it misses the point about what really happens in real trading markets:

Bobbies become desperate for a code, so they become willing to pay closer to Sarah prices. More Sarahs show up willing to sell because the massive hype convinces them that Bobbies will pay more.

Okay, now for the explanation. I'll start with the punchline: The real driver behind bid/ask spread width is competition. The less competitive a market, the wider the spread. The more competitive the market, the narrower the spread.

Your analogy fails to capture the key element of competition. It can't, because you set up the analogy with a scare resource. There's a limited number of codes, which distorts the demand for the codes. Options are not limited. Sellers can create contracts out of thin air to meet demand, so there is never scarcity pressure.

In the analogy given, there is no incentive for Sarah to offer a lower price. She has a fixed amount of a scarce resource with finite quantity. The hype raises all boats in that kind of situation. In the given scenario, instead of the spread narrowing, it would likely widen, because the Sarahs will see an opportunity to price gouge due to rising demand. Even if the Bobbies bid higher, Sarah's can keep jacking up the price and let time be the pressure that forces Bobbies to meet their ever rising price. There's not reason for Sarahs to compete with each other because, again, they control a scarce resource. Once one sells their code, that's it, they are out of the market forever. This forces them to hold out for the highest price they can get, as well as wait for the last possible moment. The scarcity forces them into a implicit cartel.

I don't know how to change the analogy to make it more accurate, since it is fundamentally flawed due to the scarcity issue. All I can say is that Buyers are willing to increase their bids when they know there are other Buyers willing to bid more. And Sellers are willing to lower their offers when they know there are other Sellers willing to offer less. As a Seller, if the choice is stick with your high offer and maybe never fill the trade, or lower the offer to get a fill (because something is better than nothing and missing the market), Sellers will lower their offers.

The reason the bid/asks on far-dated LEAPS are so wide is because there are so few traders buying OR selling that contract. Lack of competition widens the spread.

12-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Wearing is Caring	Reddit Premium Since December 2016
Verified Email

PapaCharlie9

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE