Free option charts

One of my ongoing frustrations has been the lack of options charting capabilities on Schwab and Fidelity trading platforms.  Perhaps that capability is there, but it is certainly not easy to find, or charts become unavailable as soon as an option expires.    Recently I discovered that  BigCharts http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/ offers free options charts and they are pretty good!

BigCharts uses  the new standard option symbols, not the Fidelity or Schwab flavors.  If you hold your mouse over their “quote” word in their options chains it will show the correct symbol.   The standard option symbol format is:  <ticker><YYMMDD><C or P> <5 digit strike price> <3 decimal strike fraction>.       So SPY 116 April calls would be:  ”SPY100417C00117000″ –obvious, right?    It wouldn’t be so bad if everyone used the same format, but my head spins looking at the at least three flavors I am aware off.

The ticker symbol still varies depending on strike price ranges for most options, but over the next few months they will all be rationalized to use the standard ticker where possible.

BigCharts avoids the huge issue of charts not being available after the options expire.  But it looks like it still suffers from the problem that intra-day information becomes unavailable soon after the options expire.  They need to allow a range of dates to be displayed, not just assume that you want everything referenced back in time from today’s date.

The other thing they need to do is to chart bid/ask values if actual trade values are not  available.   Since many options are lightly traded their charts are deserts of information.  Bid / ask history would be much better than nothing.