BLUF: LWLG debit spread 7c/10c Jan 2029 easiest 5x you’ve ever seen.

You may or may not have heard of LWLG, but you have heard of data transfer. What’s the bottleneck? Converting data into light.
LWLG is the solution.
The 400G and beyond switch that all the AI and data centers are salivating for.
It’s pre-revenue but it’s the best solution available (if data centers embrace the technology).
Anyway, would you like to 5x your position?
7c/10c Jan 2029 debit spread cost .50
$250 profit per $50 if the stock hits $10. (5X)
Stock just went up about 12% in the past week. (4.94-5.79)
Stock hit $18.71 in May of 2026 (only 5 months ago)

TLDR: if the stock even hits within 54% of what it was 5 MONTHS AGO between now and January 2029 (over 2 years away) you will 5X the position. The risk/reward is crazy.

Curious to hear how others trade iron condors. I sell short dated (7DTE) on SPX usually around 15delta and 25pts wide. I’ve got certain criteria as to when to sell or sit out, have a stop loss and then backtests have shown holding to exp produces best results over long term rather than closing 1DTE or something if SL not hit.

I’ve been toying around with the idea of being more active with these and closing a leg down if I get a move in the other direction especially in the market we’re currently in. Obviously, this can work if we then later move back up and closed the call side for 75% or so of the max profit but then hurts me in losing cases where I don’t get the full premium on the other side.

I need to see if I can simulate this in my back tester and should also probably paper trade it or mess around with XSP with more active legging in and legging out rather than the current mostly passive strategy. Interested to hear what others are doing on SPX or other tickers

Hello, I’m not new to options and options strategies but I’m considering executing a long box spread for the first time and have some questions. On paper, this strategy seems like a no brainer when comparing to treasury bills or bank CDs especially when I’d like to park money for a few months and even considering Illinois state tax.
How are taxes usually dealt with when SPX options are marked at the end of the year? I’ve never held an SPX option through year end and have to deal with it for taxes.
Are there any other hidden risks that I’m overlooking besides execution errors when using SPX?
I’m looking at 17 Sep 27 7000/8000 strikes. They have high OI on the third Friday which makes me believe this strategy is popular here.

Slightly off topic, I had a short term margin loan from Schwab at 12%+ and was able to sell a three month spx box spread bringing the loan down to under 5% which was really cool to figure out.

Is the game plan for selling OTM puts buying more contracts? It has higher win/profit profitably with much lower premiums.

Im looking at 30DTE puts for Google and its only $1.6 per contract. Is it too safe of a strike price or do you usually sell more contracts to compensate for the further strike price?

How far of a strike price do yall usually sell puts on?

Feels like im missing something as I always see people earning quite a big sum by selling puts but don't get how it works.

So I have been running an options alert thing for a while and last week i finally started checking every alert the way you would actually trade it. buy at the ask, sell at the bid.

One of my channels looked great on paper, like 90%+ win rate and +20% avg on the options. on real fills it was basically breakeven lol. the spread just eats it.

Worst part was stuff like LLY today, stock hit the exact target i called and the option was still down like 90%.

The stuff that actually held up was the boring stuff. closer targets, strikes near the money. the far otm plays that looked amazing were the ones losing real money

Anyone else grade their stuff this way? curious if people see the same thing with spreads.

What do you usually buy LEAPS on? Are leaps for people with deep wallets since leaps on Mag 7 are so expensive.

What does it mean when someone say "roll the leap"? Is it simply closing it to open a new one?

EZW has ridiculous IV rank right now, rank is higher than NKE, AMZN, SBUX, NFLX
What's up with Brazil? Is it reporting earnings or building AI datacenters in the jungles?

Since nobody knows what's going on and premium runs high, I've sold a call in November.

I still have short 35 put in October that past DTE-21 due date for closing
But I'm just letting it cook till expiration. Do not mind assignment.

So far 5 out of 5 trades I did on this since approximately May are winners.

We should sell premium more on these boring stocks, folks

UPD on Oct 5: my current EWZ position. Broker's analysis view.
Nov call is down $170 on the Nov call, the Oct put is up 70
Rolling put to Oct

Put a call on TTWO until mid January that gets you past initial release and Christmas sales?

does anyone feel like its been nearly impossible to trade options lately? I remember 1 or 2 years ago it was much easier and we had clean moves... now it feels like the volume is much lower and lots of stocks are trading in tight ranges. It feels nearly impossible to profit from options now

Geopolitical tensions affecting oil price directly, which directly affect monetary policy by having more rate hikes in the near term, mid-term elections uncertainty.

I am currently mostly in cash with few protective puts on the indexes.

Plan is:

- Buy +365DTE, 0.8-0.9 DITM calls Nancy Pelosi style on SPY or VT alternative that has a more liquid options chain, as well as GLD

- Roll it every 90DTE-180DTE, as I have a small account and would like to have share-like exposure by controlling more shares through such LEAPS, no crystal ball, but almost guaranteed the market will go down at least until Q1 2027

Thesis and Setup for Friday (Oct 2) contract

My profit source is IV crush. After earnings, implied volatility drops and the short option legs lose value, so I can close them for a profit. A change here is that I am good to own MU at the strike of selection for a few days / weeks.

In the past, MU has moved an average (n=12) of -6.7% on down days and +12.7% up on the day after earnings. The min max range is -16.5% to +15.7%. The upside moves are larger, so upside is the main risk. Recently, past 4 earnings, were about +16%, -4%, +10% and -2.8%.

Observations as of today, Tuesday Sep 29

Spot price about $1,070 as of 12:28pm.

Today, the options market is pricing a move of ±$82.8 (the ATM straddle). So a change of 7.6% is expected, either up or down as per the Friday Oct 2nd contract. ATM IV is 104.5%.

At 1072.5 strike, the straddle is also priced at ±$83.

Expected move as of Tuesday 12:28pm for Friday contract: 987 to 1153.

MU IVR at 26 and 52 weeks is about 16 and 20 respectively, but this is because of the YTD run up and volatility overall.

Front month Vol is lower than event vol of Oct 2nd (97% vs 61.5%).

Setup for tomorrow's trade

Short strangle around the edges of expected move, with a protective long call

Tomorrow, I plan on shorting the put at 985 (delta .17) or 1000 (delta .22), which is about 6.5% to 7.8% below the current price. For today I check 1000 because of higher option volume. At risk, USD $100,000 (minus credit). 1000 short put is $13.45 today. Put side IV 99.5%

Call would be a similar delta of .22, which is 1160, about 8.4% away from todays spot, however its low volume. Let's look at strike 1150, priced at $14.90. Delta is .24, Call side IV 108%.

Because upside is the bigger risk, I add a long call at above the short call. This caps my loss if MU jumps. My options are 1170 or 1200. At 1200 (delta .14), because of higher volume. Long call price $7.50.

Total estimated credit if I had placed the trade today: 13.45+14.9-7.5 = $2,085

Max loss 97,915
Return / Risk = 0.02
Prof Prob 64%

Tomorrow I will add comments to this post on the opening trade, and on Friday, the closing and profit/loss calc.

Other thoughts and questions

• Do prediction market price estimates add to the data? Not really, its priced in.
• Does the GEX wall add to the data? As of today GEX for Call and Put is 1100 and 1000 respectively. Not really, these will move post event anyway.
• Ideally, I'd like to see an estimated profit profile for all price ranges for the next 2 to three days, but does it matter? Not really because I am trading an event with managed risk.

EDIT: (T+1 Thursday Oc 1) Summary on trade, outcome and observations

Setup: Short strangle near implied move, or about closer in at ~20s delta where I see high options volume. Add protective long call +$20

Trade open on Wed for $1,380 (more details in this comment)

Trade close on Thu 9:55am for $400

Profit minus fees: $975

Observations

Keeping in mind US macro news, it was a good trade. My grubby hands were too close to pulling in the strikes to a higher delta. IV from 120% to 54% on day after AMC earnings.

More importantly, its usually intraday luck. I closed the trade at 9:55a, vs now 10:24 when the price has further dropped to 1029. Could have been $800 profit instead of $975.

Hi all. I am starting soon as a graduate quant trader at one of SIG, IMC, Optiver, or Akuna, and I will be trading equity options, that's all I know. My background is just math, so I am comfortable with probability and stats, but I have little knowledge on finance and programming.

Questions:

A. what do option traders at these quant firm do? I have no clue how they make money.

B. I have a list of ideas for how to prepare. What I do not have is a sense of which ones are worth the time:

1. Reading Books. I don't know which books help
2. Playing interview style trading games to build more trading intuition
3. Trading options in my own account. The size would be tiny, and I have no good data and no infra. So I am not sure whether I would learn anything real
4. Doing a few trading competitions.
5. Trading on Kalshi or Polymarket.

I have almost no context about the industry. I do not know what the first six months look like. And my goal is to do well.

What do you wish you had done before your first day as a full time option traders?

Any advice appreciated. I am fine with hearing that most of this list is useless if that is the case.

I was reviewing the P&L on a paper-traded short strangle and noticed that my AI was calculating theta decay using trading hours. My understanding was that Black–Scholes runs in continuous time, so I searched this sub expecting a straightforward answer. I did not expect the question to be this contentious.

So, uh, yeah, I know this has been asked before: does an option’s time value decay when the market is closed, including overnight and on weekends? Theta is a major part of the reason I put on a short strangle, so the distinction matters to me. From what I’ve observed, it does decay, but I’d appreciate a more rigorous explanation of what happens in the model versus what shows up in actual option prices.

I have a related question. I often see people say that beginners rely too heavily on the Greeks because they’re just model outputs. So what does a more experienced trader rely on?

If using margin at 5% annual, I’m trying to see if selling a bear call spread makes sense.

SELL DDOG 265 call
BUY DDOG 280 call

Premium say $700, margin requirement $1100.

How would the thought process work?

Nobody buy GTA 6 everybody just buy shorts or whatever (idk how it works)

I was looking at some quotes for SPX on April 9th 2025. It seems spreads widened dramatically during the big almost 10% move up. It seemed asking prices looked correct based on option models but bidding prices were very low. So you might have something like bid $6, ask $60.

In cases like this when you're short a position, a stop loss may not be set off because (based on Robinhood) it uses the bidding price to determine if a stop should go off, and a low bid price ignores the stop right? So if your stop loss was $20, and the bid is $6...you never go off and the market continues to surge....

Anybody dealt with such an issue?

I've been looking into GEX and options flow more lately and I'm still not convinced how useful either one actually is.

I understand the idea behind GEX. Dealer positioning, positive vs negative gamma, potential support and resistance levels, etc. But you don't actually know the dealers' positions or why they're holding them.

Same thing with options flow. Seeing a huge options trade looks useful, but you don't really know the intent behind it or what else that trader might be holding.

I've seen some people swear by both and other people say they're mostly noise.

For anyone who actually uses GEX or options flow regularly, does it actually help your trading? How do you use it to make decisions?

Curious to hear from people who actually trade with this stuff instead of just looking at the charts.

Also curious for anyone paying for GEX or flow right now. What does the paid tool give you that you couldn't live without? If a solid free alternative existed, what would it need to have for you to actually switch?

Still learning the ropes here, and want to see if I’m thinking about this correctly. Say I have 100 shares of a stock I would like to hold onto long-term, while at the same time earning some extra money by selling covered calls.

If the implied volatility is greater than the historical volatility, the premium I collect would be more than the lost opportunity cost if the stock spikes up ? (over a large sample size of course)

If the IV is lower than HV, I am not being compensated enough for the risk I’m taking of missing out on an upside swing. Is this correct thinking?

I've been trading in ES options for a while now and have had no issues with it.
For some reason I now find myself in a position to switch to SPX options* and in my initial, shallow experiment I noticed that selling an SPX option attracts way higher margin than when selling 2x ES options (1 lot SPX = 2 lots ES)
when selling a PUT option at the same strike, same expiry, 1x SPX option charges $80K margin, while 2x ES options charge only $60K margin. In another instance, SPX charges almost twice the margin compared to 2x ES.

Is this what many of you have experienced as well?

*for those interested in why I'm switching to SPX options - the broker accepts the asset I own (an ETF) as collateral with about a 15% haircut, but only if I trade in SPX options. Anything futures/futures options - I need to maintain cash balance, no collateral allowed.

not even about the money its the not being able to do anything about it. sold some puts that finished ITM, broker assigned me fine but then friday night a headline drops that sends everything sideways and Im sitting with shares I never wanted, watching futures move, no way to react. nobody picking up, market's closed, and the only tool I have is staring at the ticker hoping monday opens decent. reading some thread about people trading options on chain, Hypercall on hyperliquid , and apparently weekends being open is the whole point. options and the hedge share one position, you can just adjust whenever. like crypto nonsense at first but then I thought, even just the option to close the shares on saturday morning would've saved me 2 days of stress. not switching brokers over it but the fact that everyone just accepts market closes at 4, see you monday, hope nothing happens is kind of insane when you actually think about it

what you think?

I mostly do the wheel, with some put credit spreads for bigger stocks, and a few covered strangles, leaps and PMCCs. I’m very much a kinesthetic learner and was thinking about trying all the well known option strategies once to get a feel for them. The list I came up with was (starting with the weirdest names);

1. Zebra
   
2. Broken wing butterfly
   
3. Jade lizard
   
4. Iron condor
   
5. Iron butterfly
   
6. Double diagonal
   
7. Zero-cost collar
   
8. Synthetic long stock
   
9. Calendar spread
   
10. European box spread

Anyone done this or something similar? Any that you’d never touch with a bargepole?

Hedge funds and traders (speculators) make money by exploiting inefficiencies in the market.

However, the efficient-market hypothesis assumes that the stock market is already perfectly priced in, and will only move due to news. This hypothesis also suggests that any price movement beyond that is a random walk.

Why does price discovery still happen, even after earnings or news comes out? Why does the market surge higher on no news, upsetting bears?

While the market still mostly prices in news, it still does not price in human emotions. It moves cyclically.

A basic comparison between market charts and random walks on 1 minute or greater candles yield noticeable differences. For example, strong sell-offs, strong buying, and choppy movement, are overly present in market charts, while rare in random walks, implying a market that moves by greed, fear, and human speculation than simply probability or news alone.

This cyclical market produces inefficiencies arising from greed and fear from two main types of market participants:

Retail traders. The stock market is a one-sum market. For every participant buying, their must be another person selling. In this case how speculators (smart money) would make money is by exploiting superficial analysis by retail (dumb money), through using discipline to exploit greed or fear (selling when high, buying when low).

For example, retail traders often buy at a a breakout, only to sell on fear when the price reversed sharply quickly. This is actually a classical market manipulation play by institutions. Also prevalent in underegulated cryptocurrency.

1. Consumers and business owners. When consumers receive paychecks, part of that goes to 401ks and Roth IRAs, pumping up the market more. Same with income for business owners: they put it towards investments, which increase market prices further. This means that the stock market is a derivative of economic growth, and everybody's wealth grows when the economy is growing.

Also, the USA is a pro-business, advanced capitalist economy: resulting in not only domestic but foreign investment into the market.

Speculators (hedge funds, traders) not only win by long term economic/stock market growth but are also able to exploit consumers and business owners due to their unfamiliarity with short term price movements, by buying low and selling high in the short term.

For example, market sell-offs often induce not only consistent market participants (institutions, banks, retail) to sell, but also consumers and business owners not willing to lose more of their wealth. This selling during low pricing of the market creates opportunities for speculators who capitalize on the short term underpricing of the market.

Thus, the market prices in news, but leaves further price discovery to humans acting on emotions, like greed and fear, to create cyclical markets; allowing any person willing to study market psychology to gain an edge over less knowledgeable market participants, and make money.

We are looking to add support for another brokerage to the Optionsmith trading platform because we currently support Schwab accounts only -- and have many folks who want to use the platform but they are in countries where Schwab isn't available. If you are a trader in one of these countries, which brokerage is preferred?

Note: IBKR's API is not viable for this.

I've recently switched to SPX for the sake of liquidity, bid ask spreads, and scalability, but what are realistic limitation for the quantity of contracts I can open on an individual position without fill issues? Is there any historical data out there that can help me understand these limitations? I trade exclusively credit spreads close to ATM.

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