Stock spread: wide vs. narrow?
The point is that the bid and ask prices dictate what you can buy and sell at (at market, at least), and the difference between the two, or spread, contributes implicitly to your gains or losses. For example, say your $1 stock actually had a bid of $0.90 and an ask of $1.10; i.e. say that $1 was the last price. You would have to buy the stock at the ask price of $1.10, but now you can only sell that stock at the bid price of $0.90. Thus, you would need to make at least that $0.20 spread before you can make a profit.
This sometimes happens to me. It depends on how liquid the option is. Normally what I see happening is that the order book mutates itself around my order. I interpret this to mean that the order book is primarily market makers. They see a retail investor (me) come in and, since they don't have any interest in this illiquid option, they back off. Some other retail investor (or whatever) steps in with a market order, and we get matched up. I get a fill because I become the market maker for a brief while. On highly liquid options, buy limits at the bid tend to get swallowed because the market makers are working the spread. With very small orders (a contract or two) on very liquid options, I've had luck getting quick fills in the middle of the spread, which I attribute to MM's rebalancing their holdings on the cheap, although sometimes I like to think there's some other anal-retentive like me out there that hates to see such a lopsided book. :) I haven't noticed any particular tendency for this to happen more with puts or calls, or with buy vs sell transactions. For a while I had a suspicion that this was happening with strikes where IV didn't match IV of other strikes, but I never cared enough to chase it down as it was a minor part of my overall P/L. Each of those is a network. Merchants displaying their logos - participate in their network and will accept cards that bear the same logo. Most merchants participate in more than one network. Discover is mostly used in the US, while Visa, Mastercard and American Express are more widely spread in the world (Amex less, Visa and MC are much more widely spread). In addition to being widely spread in the US, Discover is accepted everywhere where UnionPay is accepted (mostly in China) and Diners Club (mostly in EMEA). Advantages/disadvantages? You'll have to compare specific cards, but if you're a traveler in the world - then Discover will probably not be as appealing as Visa or Mastercard. Determine an investment strategy and that will likely answer this for you. Different people have different approaches and you need to determine for yourself what buy and sell criteria you want to have. Again, depending on the strategy there can be a wide range here as some may trade index funds though this can backfire in some cases. In others, there can be a lot of buy and hold if one finds an index fund to hold forever which depending on the strategy is possible. Returns can vary widely as an index can be everything from buying gold stocks in Russia to investing in short-term Treasuries as there are many different indices as any given market can have an index which could be stocks, bonds, a combination of the two or something else in some cases so please consider asset allocation, types of accounts, risk tolerance and time horizon in making decisions or consider using a financial planner to assist in drawing up a plan with allocations and how frequently you want to rebalance as my suggestion here. "Joke warning: These days, it seems that rogue trading programs are the big market makers (this concludes the joke) Historically, exchange members were market makers. One or more members guaranteed a market in a particular stock, and would buy whatever you wanted to sell (or vice-versa). In a balanced market -- one where there were an equal number of buyers and sellers -- the spread was indeed profit for them. To make this work, market makers need an enormous amount of liquidity (ability to hold an inventory of stocks) to deal with temporary imbalances. And a day like October 29, 1929, can make that liquidity evaporate. I say ""historically,"" because I don't think that any stock market works this way today (I was discussing this very topic with a colleague last week, went to Wikipedia to look at the structure of the NYSE, and saw no mention of exchange members as market makers -- in fact, it appears that the NYSE is no longer a member-based exchange). Instead, today most (all?) trading happens on ""electronic crossing networks,"" where the spread is simply the difference between the highest bid and lowest ask. In a liquid stock, there will be hundreds if not thousands of orders clustered around the ""current"" price, usually diverging by fractions of a cent. In an illiquid stock, there may be a spread, but eventually one bid will move up or one ask will move down (or new bids will come in). You could claim that an entity with a large block of stock to move takes the role of market maker, but it doesn't have the same meaning as an exchange market maker. Since there's no entity between the bidder and asker, there's no profit in the spread, just a fee taken  by the ECN. Edit: I think you have a misconception of what the ""spread"" is. It's simply the difference between the highest bid and the lowest offer. At the instant a trade takes place, the spread is 0: the highest bid equals the lowest offer, and the bidder and seller exchange shares for money. As soon as that trade is completed, the spread re-appears. The only way that a trade happens is if buyer and seller agree on price. The traditional market maker is simply an entity that has the ability to buy or sell an effectively unlimited number of shares. However, if the market maker sets a price and there are no buyers, then no trade takes place. And if there's another entity willing to sell shares below the market maker's price, then the buyers will go to that entity unless the market's rules forbid it." I use StockCharts for spread charting. To take your question as an example, here is the chart of Apple against Nasdaq. Good points. It's not a completely new shift, as some equities are behaving as one would historically expect: $LMT just missed earnings and investors are responding appropriately. So while overall things seem somewhat strange, there are still classic signs of behavior. "Figured it out.  Vertical spreads significantly reduce the amount of ""buying power"" on the account needed vs. buying / selling pure calls / puts.  So even though the transaction fees may more double in some instances, it may be worth it in order to operate with pricier underlying instruments. Spreads are also considered ""defined risk"" trades where both the profit and loss are capped per how the spreads are setup.  This is compared to single calls / puts where either the upside or the downside can be unlimited.  So for times when the expected move is not as pronounced, a spread may be a better fit depending on environment and other factors." "Your strategy fails to control risk. Your ""inversed crash"" is called a rally. And These kind of things often turn into bigger rallies because of short squeezes, when all the people that are shorting a stock are forced to close their stock because of margin calls - its not that shorts ""scramble"" to close their position, the broker AUTOMATICALLY closes your short positions with market orders and you are stuck with the loss. So no, your ""trick"" is not enough. There are better ways to profit from a bearish outlook."