Weekly Options

StoneBone

There are currently 423 products that trade weekly options including most major indices, stocks, and ETF's. Here are some of the advantages of weekly option trading. Weeklies tend to be more liquid allowing for better and faster fills. Weeklies have tighter bid/ask spreads minimizing slippage (take a look at the difference in SPX bid/ask spreads between monthly and weekly expiration dates). Weeklies allow for greater flexibility by providing more trading opportunities for active investors. StockCharts.com has a wonderful array of trading tools to help subscribers gain a competitive advantage, but they don't yet allow scanning for weekly option, e.g. "[weekly optionable is true]". Scanning for weekly options should be part of the mix. Do you agree?

markd

CBOE publishes a spreadsheet that includes symbols with weekly options. Since the list has fewer than 500 symbols, you can upload the symbols to an SC list and make that list the target of your scan. You do have to know a little Excel to do it.

Make a duplicate of the downloaded Excel file
edit out the asterisks and other special characters from a few of the symbols
If you want to trade the indexes, add a "$" sign in front of the index symbols to conform to Stockcharts symbol format, like $OEX, not OEX.

Eliminate all columns except the symbols and any other extraneous cells, or, just copy the symbols to a new, clean file
Save the symbol file in .csv format

Create a list in Stockcharts
On the edit page, select Browse to get your .csv file then click upload

If you didn't add the $ sign to the index symbols, Stockcharts doesn't recognize them. You can add those to your list manually, or go back and edit the symbols in the Excel file before creating the .csv file.

Here is the link to the page with a link to the spreadsheet:

cboe.com/micro/weeklys/availableweeklys.aspx

Remember the pitfalls of options. The leverage works both ways, so your timing must be precise.

StoneBone

Thank you. This is very helpful!

StoneBone

markd - how can you make the weekly option chart list a target of a scan on the Advanced Scan Workbench.? Filling in the name of the chart list (e.g. "Weekly Options") doesn't work.

markd

On the advanced scan page, below the scan window is a "Scan Builder" section with a series of drop downs. One of the drop downs is "Chart Lists" (near the bottom). Select your options list from that list and click insert. The name of the list will appear at the BOTTOM of your scan. You may have to scroll down to see it. Cut and paste it to the FIRST LINE of your scan (edit out the "and" at the start of the line). Do check syntax, fix any errors and run scan.

StoneBone

That works! Thank you so much for this helpful advise.