Anyone scalping the FTSE Futures??

might print a new high for noon ... still thinking limited upside for the mo but the way it's been going it would be easy to jump ship

160 is supporting for now
 
wouldnt mind seeing a 6171 FTSE and 13613 to 628 area DOW today just to finish the inverted five on the FTSE
 
SD I need a bit of options 101 here. Firstly, thanks for the screenshot of the call and put numbers for January. Where did you get that table from ?

I take it that the strike price is the FTSE cash at 10:15am, and not the Futures price. Secondly, if that is the case the FTSE cash was 6167 at the close of 10:14:59, so all of the put options from 5875 to 6150 expired worthless.

Does that mean that all of the call options from 5875 to 6150 expired in the money and the writer of those calls had to pay up to the value of that call option. ie the guy that wrote the call option to sell the FTSE cash at 5875 had to honour that option and pay up the difference between 5875 and 6167?

If you take it that all of the calls between 5875 and 6150 expired with the writer of the calls paying money, and the writer of the put pocketing the premium, there were 106528 calls against 92466 puts. So there were more calls than puts at expiry which should mean that there were more people looking for protection against rising prices than those looking for protection against falling prices.

What I am hoping is that you can look at these charts prior to expiry and get some kind of idea as to where the price might head into expiry. I have a feeling that someone has tried to do this before and discovered that there was no correlation, so all of my waffle may be for nothing. However, I would add that as I was watching the price action into 10:15 am on the futures market, it was quite clear that someone wanted the price to close at highs at expiry, and maybe there was some way to predict that in advance.

I have a platform called Mytrack edge. which has options futures and basically about anything u need built in. The options work from the FTSE cash price.

To work out the settlement price for FTSE100 cash, it is not the last price but the settlement price Exchange Delivery Settlement Price,EDSP its worked out according to a formula which tries to prevent manipulation.

the settlement price normally can be found here UKXSP.L Technical Analysis | FTSE 100 EDSP Stock - Yahoo! UK & Ireland Finance

todays appears to be 6166.21 so all calls at and above this level will be worthless and all puts at or below this level will also be worthless.

I have never found the open interest at various strike prices to be predictive of ftse moves, an old wives tale is that the market moves to the point of biggest open interest on expiry, the best way I find to use this prices is to have your very own FTSE vix, so today the 6150 call and 6150 put trade for 61/69 total of 130. so the market is pricing in that FTSE during the next 30 days will trade in a 130pt range. this is pretty reliable. So if you happened to be long you would have a general idea not to close your long until u saw maybe 120pts range .

Options are usually traded in combination, people sell one option to finance another.
 
I have a platform called Mytrack edge. which has options futures and basically about anything u need built in. The options work from the FTSE cash price.

To work out the settlement price for FTSE100 cash, it is not the last price but the settlement price Exchange Delivery Settlement Price,EDSP its worked out according to a formula which tries to prevent manipulation.

the settlement price normally can be found here UKXSP.L Technical Analysis | FTSE 100 EDSP Stock - Yahoo! UK & Ireland Finance

todays appears to be 6166.21 so all calls at and above this level will be worthless and all puts at or below this level will also be worthless.

I have never found the open interest at various strike prices to be predictive of ftse moves, an old wives tale is that the market moves to the point of biggest open interest on expiry, the best way I find to use this prices is to have your very own FTSE vix, so today the 6150 call and 6150 put trade for 61/69 total of 130. so the market is pricing in that FTSE during the next 30 days will trade in a 130pt range. this is pretty reliable. So if you happened to be long you would have a general idea not to close your long until u saw maybe 120pts range .

Options are usually traded in combination, people sell one option to finance another.

Many thanks SD. That's a really comprehensive answer. I do remember going through this before and I think I arrived at the conclusion that its hard to tell which way it will end up. I am probably better just sticking with my charts and watching the price action unfold at 10:10 am on the morning of an expiry. Either way it is pretty high risk and I probably should avoid trading it unless I really am sure of the outcome.
 
Is Low VIX a Concern Yet?
BY BOB LANG
Many are seeing the low VIX as a warning sign of too much complacency, and I totally get that. Protection is hardly ever this cheap and I would always advocate buying some here as 'just in case' insurance.

Is Low VIX a Concern Yet?
 
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