When I google a ticker like XLE or something, I see a price which updates frequently (about every second or so), where can I find this for options?
you can try CME DataSuite. Your broker gives you real time options quotes. If you do not have one you can open a scottrade account with just $500 deposit. When I moved my money from scottrade to ameritrade they did not close my account even till this day I can access my scottrade account and see real time quotes and the same research they offered me before. You can try withdrawing your deposit and see if it stays open like mine did. You probably will not find to many places if any that give you live quotes on options because for the general public there is not that high of a demand. Most people do not even know what stock options are.  You can get update on some sites like CNBC, but you will have refresh constantly to get the latest option prices.  You can also try an online broker, most of whom will let you have access to their tools and quotes if you sign up for an account. Some require a deposit before you can access those tools and some don't. Personally, I use TD Ameritrade and I do not believe they require a deposit to use their tools, but don't quote me on that.
"&gt; Im genuinely enjoying the conversation and sorry about the name calling most of my political and economic debates happen with family where name calling is not only accepted but expected lol.  Same. We can't even talk about politics anymore because it became to contentious. It is a shame, since I do enjoy talking about it.   &gt; this link seems to contradict that statment.  From your source: ""Kellogg School assistant professor of strategy Craig Garthwaite and his coauthors find that when the population of uninsured Americans increases, hospitals end up bearing the cost by providing uncompensated care.""  And also from your source: ""Most of it is in the form of Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, which, according to federal law, are owed to any qualified hospital that serves a large number of Medicaid and uninsured patients.""   So basically, just like I said - when an uninsured or underinsured person gets treated, but then doesn't pay, the Hospitals file a claim and seek reimbursement from Medicare / Medicaid to get some of that non-payment back. The only thing is, they only get a percent of the non-payment reimbursed. How do many of these hospitals deal with this? By jacking up prices in the hopes of getting a larger chunk of the *actual* cost reimbursed.   From your source:  ""“The DSH payments are less than the uncompensated care that’s provided,” explains Garthwaite.""  &gt; This is dangerously false. The industry isnt known for underbidding and going over budget.   I think we are both looking at our respective industries through rose colored glass. I think we can agree that each of us can point out instances where industry and government have pooped the bed. You can probably spill out a dozen example of government wasted dollars, and I can tell you a dozen example of corporations that weren't efficient, that were slow, and that the government beat them at a task.   I think we are both right, and that both exist in a world where they can be inefficient and wasteful, and they can also be speedy and innovative. If you would like to see examples, I will share some.   What we haven't seen, is a world in which commercial runs it all and runs everything efficiently. We have seen places where government runs it all, and it went to hell in a handbasket - USSR, NK, East Germany are all prime examples. I actually lived in Germany when the wall came down, so I got to see what an isolationist, and a government only run program looks like firsthand." "I don't know really is the best investment strategy. People think that they have to know everything to make money. But realistically, out of the hundreds of thousands of publicly traded securities, you really can only invest in a tiny number of them. Of the course of a week, you literally have more than a million ""buy"" or ""don't buy"" decisions, because the prices of those securities fluctuate every day.  Simply due to the fact that there are so many securities, you cannot know what everything is going to do. You have to say ""I don't know"". Also, when you do understand something, it is usually fairly priced. So will you make money on it? ""I don't know"". Only very rarely will you find something that you actually understand well and it is significantly undervalued. You can be looking at a company a day for two years before you find it. But people get trigger happy. They bet on 51%/49% odds when they should only bet on 90%/10% odds or higher.  If you are forced to bet on everything, it makes sense that you bet on everything you believe is greater than 50% chance of winning. But since you cannot bet on everything, you should only bet on the highest quality bets, those with greater than 90% chance of winning. To find such a bet, you may have to shuffle through 100 different companies and only make 2-3 bets. You are looking for something that is at least 2 standard deviations away from the mean.  People are not good at doing a lot of work, most of which yields nothing, to find one big payoff. They are wired to only look at the present, so they take the best bet they can see at the moment, which is often barely above 50% (and with any misjudgment, it may actually be well below 50%). And people are not good at understanding compound/geometric growth. You can keep multipling 10% gains (1.10 * 1.10 * 1.10 ...), but that can all be wiped out by multiplying by one zero, which is why taking a 51%/49% bet is so dangerous (even though technically it is an advantageous one). They forget to adjust for the geometric aspect of compounding. A 99%/1% bet is one you should take, but if you are allowed to repeat it and you keep going all-in, you will eventually lose and have $0, which is the same as if you took a single all-in bet that has 0% chance of winning.  As Buffett says, if you are only allowed to make 20 investments over a lifetime, you will most likely do better because it prevents you from making many of these mistakes." "No.  The more legs you add onto your trade, the more commissions you will pay entering and exiting the trade and the more opportunity for slippage.  So lets head the other direction.   Can we make a simple, risk-free option trade, with as few legs as possible? The (not really) surprising answer is ""yes"", but there is no free lunch, as you will see.  According to financial theory any riskless position will earn the risk free rate, which right now is almost nothing, nada, 0%.   Let's test this out with a little example. In theory, a riskless position can be constructed from buying a stock, selling a call option, and buying a put option.  This combination should earn the risk free rate. Selling the call option means you get money now but agree to let someone else have the stock at an agreed contract price if the price goes up.  Buying the put option means you pay money now but can sell the stock to someone at a pre-agreed contract price if you want to do so, which would only be when the price declines below the contract price.  To start our risk free trade, buy Google stock, GOOG, at the Oct 3 Close:   495.52 x 100sh = $49,552 The example has 100 shares for compatibility with the options contracts which require 100 share blocks. we will sell a call and buy a put @ contract price of $500 for Jan 19,2013.   Therefore we will receive $50,000 for certain on Jan 19,2013, unless the options clearing system fails, because of say, global financial collapse, or war with Aztec spacecraft. According to google finance, if we had sold a call today at the close we would receive the bid, which is 89.00/share, or $8,900 total.  And if we had bought a put today at the close we would pay the ask, which is 91.90/share, or $9190 total. So, to receive $50,000 for certain on Jan 19,2013 we could pay $49,552 for the GOOG stock, minus $8,900 for the money we received selling the call option, plus a payment of $9190 for the put option we need to protect the value.  The total is $49,842.   If we pay $49,842 today, plus execute the option strategy shown, we would have $50,000 on Jan 19,2013.  This is a profit of $158, the options commissions are going to be around $20-$30, so in total the profit is around $120 after commissions.   On the other hand, ~$50,000 in a bank CD for 12 months at 1.1% will yield $550 in similarly risk-free interest.   Given that it is difficult to actually make these trades simultaneously, in practice, with the prices jumping all around, I would say if you really want a low risk option trade then a bank CD looks like the safer bet.  This isn't to say you can't find another combination of stock and contract price that does better than a bank CD -- but I doubt it will ever be better by very much and still difficult to monitor and align the trades in practice." NYSE started allowing four letter tickers around 2009.  NASDAQ allows 4-5 letter tickers.  I guess they'll keep increasing when / if needed.  Companies are allowed to change tickers, although there are costs.  Tickers in the US are assigned through a single entity.  Companies that are new need to take something that's open. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124296050986346159 I see that you're in Australia, but, since there aren't really that many options to deal with the problem that you mentioned, I'd guess that you'll ultimately do the same.  Not sure about how tickers are assigned there though. There is nothing called actual, unless you convert currency. There are real offer rates that are slightly different from Bank to Bank. Search Engines give a generic average value based on the sites they are trust / have tie-up with. Banks don't use google or search engines to get the basis, they have quite a bit more info and there is a specific Treasury function that would look at the trend and give out a huge spread between buy and sell. In my experience thanks to algorithmic trading the variation of the spread and the range of trading straight after a major data release will be as random as possible, since we live in an age that if some pattern existed at these times HFT firms would take out any opportunity within nanoseconds. Remember that some firms write algorithms to predict other algorithms, and it is at times like those that this strategy would be most effective. With regards to my own trading experience I have seen orders fill almost €400 per contract outside of the quoted range, but this is only in the most volatile market conditions. Generally speaking, event investing around numbers like these are only for top wall street firms that can use co-location servers and get a ping time to the exchange of less than 5ms. Also, after a data release the market can surge/plummet in either direction, only to recover almost instantly and take out any stops that were in its path. So generally, I would say that slippage is extremely unpredictable in these cases( because it is an advantage to HFT firms to make it so ) and stop-loss orders will only provide limited protection. There is stop-limit orders( which allow you to specify a price limit that is acceptable ) on some markets and as far as I know InteractiveBrokers provide a guaranteed stop-loss fill( For a price of course ) that could be worth looking at, personally I dont use IB.  I hope this answer provides some helpful information, and generally speaking, super-short term investing is for algorithms. "In addition to the other answers it's also noteworthy that the stock exchanges themselves adjust the price quotes via their ex-div mechanism.  All limit orders present in the book when the stock goes ex-div will be adjusted by the dividend. Which means you can't even get ""accidentally"" filled in the very unlikely case that everyone forgot to adjust their quotes." The Federal Reserve Bank publishes exchange rate data in their H.10 release. It is daily, not minute by minute. The Fed says this about their data: About the Release The H.10 weekly release contains daily rates of   exchange of major currencies against the U.S. dollar. The data are   noon buying rates in New York for cable transfers payable in the   listed currencies. The rates have been certified by the Federal   Reserve Bank of New York for customs purposes as required by section   522 of the amended Tariff Act of 1930. The historical EURUSD rates for the value of 1 EURO in US$ are at: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h10/hist/dat00_eu.htm If you need to know USDEUR the value of 1 US$ in EUROS use division 1.0/EURUSD.