Ameritrade is damn expensive: $9.99

plus fees for options also

Yeah the cheap commissions plus API is it's selling point, though I don't have an account there

Wow man yeah that is pretty expensive

Are their preipheral services good or something?

eh, they're okay. Good with tracking for tax purposes

good customer service

and I don't make any trades

if I did more day trading I would probably open a second account

Interactive Brokers provides absolutely no frills lol. Not even stock quotes, you would have to look that up on Yahoo. Though they will supply you with data for extra subscription fees

I see

I'm talking about them because I researched them, but i don't actually use them. I use Schwab

quoting through pleb-tier finance sites is almost real-time now, so that's a decent trade-off

Schwab is like 8 dollars an option trade plus .65 per contract, and they only allow two legs per trade, so building something like an iron condor costs quite a lot which is why I don't bother most of the time

On the Iron Condor I sold there, I think I paid like 30 bucks in fees

Ouch

Ameritrade would be about the same though

Here's a trade I've starting thing about

I was thinking about @Zyzz 's thesis about the S&P500 going up this year

and I was thinking to research it a bit more, but here's my idea

Buy a long term (Maybe a LEAP) OTM call option, but sell a near term call at the same strike

that way trying to save on the time premium

I would need to research more to try to figure out a good window of time

thats an interesting thought

buying the dec 2018 295 strike is ~$2.60. that implies 10% appreciation over 2018

@Zyzz Yeah maybe we can put our heads together and crowdsource this together. (Since this isn't happening right away I think, then I think we have time). Here's the three questions I would like to figure out: 1. What is a reasonable price target that can be achieved this year? 2. When is a reasonable window in which it might reach that target? 3. Are there any reasonable near-term windows where we might think it *won't* hit the target? For example maybe the answers are 4%, September, and March, respectively

Hmm now we're cooking, let me pull those chains up

@ThisIsChris so heres my thought as to how we will figure out a price target. we need forward earnings predictions and then apply a reasonable multiple to it. that will allow us to back into our price target.

we are essentially taking earnings predictions and applying a multiple to it. the trick with the multiple is we need to assess if it could compress or expand

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/holdings?p=SPY

according to that the S&P is trading at 21x P/E

which is very rich.. historically the S&P trades at ~15x

@Zyzz @Deleted User phew, chains:

"according to that the S&P is trading at 21x P/E
which is very rich.. historically the S&P trades at ~15x" @Zyzz what do you think? Is that necessarily bad news? Or should we try to see if earnings might go up?

@ThisIsChris its really about reversion to the mean and from this vantage point it means go down

Doing it this way, I wonder if we should be looking at an ETF with fewer holdings so that we can look into each major holding individually, though if there is another way I would love to know

individual stock research is a lot of work and even with all the research there could be something you just miss or never thought about that tanks the stock.. it could be bad or greedy management.. which for us would be tough for us to be privy to

Hey that's OK then, maybe SPY going up isn't the thing, maybe we should be looking at SPY to go down over the year then. That's actually kind of more interesting because we might expect a slight boost at the beginning thanks to the tax cuts, and then a reversion later in the year

i used to pick stocks and i did not do very well and it was mostly due to stock specific issues so i changed to pick sectors or invest in income producing securities like preferred stock

yeah my issue with that is i have no idea when the market will tank. i know we are in a bubble but it seems like trump and everyone else in congress is deadset on blowing it until it pops on its own. i am not about to be short this market it just seems like their is too much momentum with the tax bill etc. it'd be like shorting the market in 2005/2006 imo

I'm back, catching up to the thread...