I know that analogies usually confuse more than they help—but that’s not going to stop me from trying… Imagine that you are the season ticket holder of 4 good seats for a major league football team at the beginning of the season. A lot of people think the team is headed for the Superbowl, but you are pessimistic. You’d like to cash in on the …
In a recent post I gave an overview of dividend capture strategies. In some situations, an effective way to hedge risk with a dividend capture strategy is to use covered call options. If you are not familiar with options this might sound exotic, but it’s truly the training wheels of option trading. With covered calls, you can introduce yourself to the conservative, hedging possibilities of …
In trying to capture dividends there is no free lunch. In fact, since Wall street is involved, the best you can hope for is an affordable lunch. I have looked at, and tried quite a few approaches—most of which don’t work, but I have found one approach that does work with some ETFs. Ironically you don’t actually collect the dividend most of the time, but …
In 2010 options symbols transitioned to a new terminology. Unfortunately Fidelity and Schwab decided they didn’t want to use the standard, generic format, so they invented their own “better” version of the new symbols. Here are the new formats: Generic, industry standard format: “SPY 10417C00114000” (<symbol> <YYMMDD> <C or P><5 digit whole dollar strike><3 digit decimal>). Schwab’s systems: “SPY 04/17/2010 114.00 …
I have only found one site that offers completely free option charts for stocks, Exchange Traded Products, and indexes: BigCharts. I provide more information about it below. Recently Schwab (StreetSmart Pro) and Fidelity (Active Trader Pro and standard web site) have started offering option charts to customers, but they require you to at least setup an account with them. Neither of these use the “standard” …
