How to sell option with no volume
Volume @ 0 doesn't mean that there are no buyers and sellers, it just means that there hasn't been any trades done yet. What you need to look for are the bids and offers (for selling and buying, respectively). For further expiration and NTM or IT options there will almost always be a bid and an offer (but it may be very wide). Now, in case where there is 0 bid (no one is willing to buy), you may still have a chance if the option has some value in it. For that - you need your broker to try to shop it to market making firms. Now, depending on who your broker is, this may or may not be possible. Alternatively, if you have DMA (direct market access) to the options exchanges, you can try to put in an offer of your own and wait for someone to execute against you, however do not expect to be traded with unless your price is out of line with the cost. However, in wide markets, you can try Lampost options (they may give you price improvement) or try to offer very close to the bid. You may save yourself a penny or two and perhaps get a rebate if you are using BATSO or NASDAQO markets (if you have DMA and pass-through exchange fees). A few observations - A limit order can certainly work, as you've seen.  I've put in such an order far beyond the true value, and gotten back a realistic bid/ask within 10 minutes or so. That at least gave me an idea where to set my limit.  When this doesn't work, an exercise is always another way to go. You'll get the full intrinsic value, but no time value, by definition.  Per your request in comment - You own a put, strike price $100. The stock (or ETF) is trading at $50. You buy the stock and tell the broker to exercise the put, i.e. deliver the stock to the buyer of the put.
"Can anyone explain what each of them mean and how they're different from each other? When you ""buy to open"", you are purchasing an option and opening a new position. When you ""sell to open"", you are creating a brand new options contract and selling it. ""Covered"" means that you have assets in your account to satisfy the terms of the options contract. A ""covered call"" is a call option for which you own shares of the underlying stock that you will sell to the buyer at the option's strike price if he exercises the option. If you previously made a ""sell to open"" trade to create a new position, and you want to close the position, you can buy back the option. If you previously made a ""buy to open"" trade, you can ""sell to close"" which will sell back your option and close your position. In summary:" I think dying is too strong a word for sell-side ER. There's no question it's shrinking though. Dying implies it's going to be dead. I believe it will carry on but at a reduced level.  Sell-side equity research derives it's revenues in a really arcane way. It can no longer benefit from i-banking revenues so it's dependent on trading volume. Trading volume is way down so that income is also shrinking.  At the same time, a lot of equity research shops have just become conduits between the buy-side and management. Their research product isn't great.  So why do I think sell-side ER will stick around? Because there are some BBs and independent shops doing real research work that provides value to the buyside. Their product has value. The buyside knows it. Demand for the research from these firms will continue.  If you're really interested in ER, I think you need to start to understand the difference between places doing good ER and bad ER. If you go into a good ER shop and learn how to be a good equity research analyst, you have a valuable skill.   I'm not going to try to paint a rosy picture of the er industry but understand the best time to get your foot in the door is when everybody else is running away. If the industry can tough it out, you'll be in a good spot. Typically this isn't a random order- having a small volume just means it's not showing on the chart, but it is a vlid price point. Same thing would've happened if it would've been a very large order that shows on the chart. Consider also that this could have been the first one of many transactions that go far below your stop point - would you not have wanted it to be executed then, at this time, as it did? Would you expect the system to look into future and decide that this is a one time dip, and not sell; versus it is a crash, and sell? Either way, the system cannot look in the future, so it has no way to know if a crash is coming, or if it was a short dip; therefore the instrcutions are executed as given - sell if any transfer happens below the limit. To avoid that (or at least reduce the chance for it), you can either leave more distance (and risk a higher loss when it crashes), or trade higher volumes, so the short small dip won't execute your order; also, very liquid stocks will not show such small transaction dips. Remember that unless you participate in the actual fund that these individuals offer to the public, you will not get the same returns they will. If you instead do something like, look at what Warren Buffet's fund bought/sold yesterday (or even 60 minutes ago), and buy/sell it yourself, you will face 2 obstacles to achieving their returns: 1) The timing difference will mean that the value of the stock purchased by Warren Buffet will be different for your purchase and for his purchase. Because these investors often buy large swathes of stock at once, this may create large variances for 2 reasons: (a) simply buying a large volume of a stock will naturally increase the price, as the lowest sell orders are taken up, and fewer willing sellers remain; and (b) many people (including institutional investors) may be watching what someone like Warren Buffet does, and will want to follow suit, chasing the same pricing problem. 2) You cannot buy multiple stocks as efficiently as a fund can. If Warren Buffet's fund holds, say, 50 stocks, and he trades 1 stock per day [I have absolutely no idea about what diversification exists within his fund], his per-share transaction costs will be quite low, due to share volume. Whereas for you to follow him, you would need 50 transactions upfront, + 1 per day. This may appear to be a small cost, but it could be substantial. Imagine if you wanted to invest 50k using this method - that's $1k for each of 50 companies. A $5 transaction fee would equal 1% of the value of each company invested [$5 to buy, and $5 to sell]. How does that 1% compare to the management fee charged by the actual fund available to you? In short, if you feel that a particular investor has a sound strategy, I suggest that you consider investing with them directly, instead of attempting to recreate their portfolio. The fact that the option is deep in the money will be reflected in the market price of the option so you can just sell it at a profit. If there's a (n almost) guaranteed profit to be had, however, you can always find someone who will lend you the money to cover the exercise... they'll charge you interest, however! If the stock has dropped from $10 to $2 and now is range trading between $2 and $3, and you were not able to sell your shares earlier, then I would no be holding on to them now. As soon as the price hit $3 sell them. After you have sold them and you noticed the stock still range trading one strategy you could apply is to go long after the price bounces off the $2 support placing a stop just below $2, then as the price moves up you trail your stop up with the price. As it starts getting close to $3 tighten your stop. If it keeps range trading and bounces off the resistance at $3 and you get stopped out, you can either go short and reverse the process or wait for it to bounce off the support at $2 again. One word of warning though, the longer a stock range trades, the bigger the outbreak out of the rage (either up or down) will be, that is the reason why you should first wait for confirmation that the price has bounced off support/resistance before opening a position, and secondly why you should use a stop loss to get you out instead of just selling when it hits $3, because if it breaks through $3 you can continue profiting as it moves up. This can be done, you can be prosecuted for some forms of it, in any case there are more riskless ways of doing what you suggested. First, buying call options from market makers results in market makers buying shares at the same delta as the call option. (100 SHARES X DELTA = How many shares MM's bought). You can time this with the volume and depth of the shares market to get a bigger resulting move caused by your options purchase to get bigger quote changes in your option. So on expiration day you can be trade near at the money options back and forth between being out the money and in the money. You would exit the position into liquidity at a profit. The risk here is that you can be sitting on a big options position, where the commissions costs get really big, but you can spread this out amongst several options contracts. Second, you can again take advantage of market maker inefficiencies by getting your primary position (whether in the share market or options market) placed, and then your other position being a very large buy order a few levels below the best bid. Many market makers and algorithms will jump in front of your, they think they are being smart, but it will raise the best bid and likely make a few higher prints for the mark, raising the price of your call option. And eventually remove your large buy order. Again, you exit into liquidity. This is called spoofing. There have been some regulatory actions against people in doing this in the last few years. As for consequences, you need to put things into perspective. US capital market regulators have the most nuanced regulations and enforcement actions of worldwide capital market regulators, and even then they get criticized for being unable or unwilling to curb these practices. With that perspective American laws are basically a blueprint on what to do in 100 other country's stock exchanges, where the legislature has never gotten around to defining the same laws, the securities regulator is even more underfunded and toothless, and the markets more inefficient. Not advice, just reality. An option gives you the option rather than the obligation to buy (or sell) the underlying so you don't have to exercise you can just let the option expire (so long it doesn't have an automatic expiry). After expiration the option is worthless if it is out of the money but other than that has no hangover. Option prices normally drop as the time value of the option decays. An option has two values associated with it; time value and exercise value. Far out of the money (when the price of the underlying is far from the strike price on the losing side) options only have time value whereas deep in the money options (as yours seems to be) has some time value as well as the intrinsic value of the right to buy (sell) at a low (high) price and then sell (buy) the underlying.  The time value of the option comes from the possibility that the price of the underlying will move (further) in your favour and make you more money at expiry. As expiry closes it is less likely that there will be a favourable mood so this value declines which can cause prices to move sharply after a period of little to no revaluing. Up to now what I have said applies to both OTC and traded options but exchange traded options have another level of complexity in their trading; because there are fewer traders in the options market the size of trade at which you can move the market is much lower. On the equities markets you may need to trade millions of shares to have be substantial enough to significantly move a price, on the options markets it could be thousands or even hundreds. If these are European style options (which sounds likely) and a single trading entity was holding a large number of the exchange traded options and now thinks that the price will move significantly against them before expiry their sell trade will move the market lower in spite of the options being in the money. Their trade is based on their supposition that by the time they can exercise the option the price will be below the strike and they will lose money. They have cashed out at a price that suited them and limited what they will lose if they are right about the underlying. If I am not correct in my excise style assumption (European) I may need more details on the trade as it seems like you should just exercise now and take the profit if it is that far into the money.