What is the options industry changing about option symbols in February, 2010?
"The change is generally known as the Options Symbology Initiative (or ""OSI"") and there is a highly comprehensive guide to what occurred here. The basic gist of what occurred was a shift FROM: A coded system in which a shorter (3   to 5 letter symbol) could be used, but   the symbols required a data source to   determine what they meant. MSQ AD   used to be a MSFT Jan 20 option, but   you had to look up MSQ in a table to   know that. TO: A system in which much longer symbols   are needed, but they contain all the   information required to identify a   unique option: DELL 4.000 C 5/16/2010   isn't easy to type, but once you know   how to read it, it's easy to see that   it's an option on DELL, expiring on May 16th 2010, is a call (rather   than a put,) and has a strike price   of 4. As to why they did it, there are a number of benefits, but most important reason is this one:  they were running out of symbols.  The number of permutations of 3-5 letter symbols had been exceeded by the number of options that had been listed, resulting in the need to ""recycle"" symbols.   This meant that a current option symbol would be the same as an old one, in some cases on a different stock, which was wreaking havoc on historical data." Here is what I could find on the net: http://education.wallstreetsurvivor.com/options-symbol-changes-coming-february-12th-2010 So it sounds like it does not affect how you invest in options but only how you look them up.  I remember using a Bloomberg terminal and it wasn't clear what the expiry date of the option you were looking at was.  It looks like the new quote system addresses this. HTH.
My super fund and I would say many other funds give you one free switch of strategies per year.  Some suggest you should change from high growth option to a more balance option once you are say about 10 to 15 years from retirement, and then change to a more capital guaranteed option a few years from retirement. This is a more passive approach and has benefits as well as disadvantages. The benefit is that there is not much work involved, you just change your investment option based on your life stage, 2 to 3 times during your lifetime. This allows you to take more risk when you are young to aim for higher returns, take a balanced approach with moderate risk and returns during the middle part of your working life, and take less risk with lower returns (above inflation) during the latter part of your working life. A possible disadvantage of this strategy is you may be in the higher risk/ higher growth option during a market correction and then change to a more balanced option just when the market starts to pick up again. So your funds will be hit with large losses whilst the market is in retreat and just when things look to be getting better you change to a more balanced portfolio and miss out on the big gains. A second more active approach would be to track the market and change investment option as the market changes. One approach which shouldn't take much time is to track the index such as the ASX200 (if you investment option is mainly invested in the Australian stock market) with a 200 day Simple Moving Average (SMA). The concept is that if the index crosses above the 200 day SMA the market is bullish and if it crosses below it is bearish. See the chart below:  This strategy will work well when the market is trending up or down but not very well when the market is going sideways, as you will be changing from aggressive to balanced and back too often. Possibly a more appropriate option would be a combination of the two. Use the first passive approach to change investment option from aggressive to balanced to capital guaranteed with your life stages, however use the second active approach to time the change. For example, if you were say in your late 40s now and were looking to change from aggressive to balanced in the near future, you could wait until the ASX200 crosses below the 200 day SMA before making the change. This way you could capture the majority of the uptrend (which could go on for years) before changing from the high growth/aggressive option to the balanced option. If you where after more control over your superannuation assets another option open to you is to start a SMSF, however I would recommend having at least $300K to $400K in assets before starting a SMSF, or else the annual costs would be too high as a percentage of your total super assets. "I have traded options, but not professionally. I hadn't come across this terminology, but I expect it counts how far in-the-money, as an ordinal, an option is relative to the distinct strike prices offered for the option series — a series being the combination of underlying symbol, expiration date, and option type (call/put); e.g., all January 2015 XYZ calls, no matter the strike. For instance, if stock XYZ trades today at $11 and the available January 2015 XYZ calls have strike prices of $6, $8, $10, $12, $14, and $16, then I would expect the $10 call could be called one strike in the money, the $8 two strikes in the money, etc. Similarly, the $12 and $14 calls would be one and two strikes out of the money, respectively. However, if tomorrow XYZ moves to $13, then the $10 previously known as one strike in the money would now be two strikes in the money, and the $12 would be the new one strike in the money. Perhaps this terminology arose because many option strategies frequently involve using options that are at- or near-the-money, so the ""one strike in"" (or out) of the money contracts would tend to be those employed frequently? Perhaps it makes it easier for people to describe strategies in a more general sense, without citing specific examples. However, the software developer in me dislikes it, given that the measurement is relative to both the current underlying price (which changes quickly), and the strike prices available in the given option series. Hence, I wouldn't use this terminology myself and I suggest you eschew it, too, in favor of something concrete; e.g. specify your contract strikes in dollar terms — especially when it matters." Then at the end, if you decide to cash in your house, you can roll the   proceeds into a fancier house to avoid paying taxes on your profit. The problem is that the book was written in 1989. That comment is no longer true; that part of the tax law changed in the 1990's. Also in 1989 the maximum amount that person could put in an IRA was $2,000 and hadn't been raised for almost a decade and wouldn't be raised for another decade. Roth accounts didn't exist; nor did HSA's or 529's. Most people didn't have a 401K. You are asking to compare what options we have today compared to what was available in the late 1980's.  For me except, for the years 2001-2005 and 2010-2015, the period from 1988 until now has had flat real estate values. Still the current values haven't returned to the peak in 2005. The score is 11 great years, 17 flat or negative. I know many people who during the 1990's had a zero return on their real estate. If you're talking about just Theta, the amount of decay due to the passage of time (all else being equal), then theoretically, the time value is a continuous function, so it would decay throughout the day (although by the day of expiry the time value is very, very small).  Which makes sense, since even with 15 minutes to go, there's still a 50/50 shot of an ATM option expiring in-the-money, so there should be some time value associated with that one-sided probability. The further away from ATM the option is, the smaller the time value will be, and will be virtually zero for options that are deep in- or out-of-the-money. If you're talking about total time value, then yes it will definitely change during the day, since the underlying components (volatility, underlying price, etc.) change more or less continuously. On the US markets, most index options are European style.  Most stock and ETF options are, as you noted, American style. Im creating a 5-year projection on Profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheet and i\m suppose to use the LIBOR (5 year forward curve) as interest rate on debt.  This is the information i am given and it in USD.  Thanks for the link.  I guess its the USD LIBOR today, in one year, in two years, three years, four years and five years A change in implied volatility tells us something about what investors are thinking (or fearing) about the volatility going forward for the life of the associated option contracts (which may be short or long-lived).  IV does a good job of summarizing the information available to investors, which includes information about the past and the present. However, whether these investor views actually translate into what happens in the future is a topic of debate in the finance literature--investors do not generally know the future--there are conflicting results available.  There have been papers that show that implied volatility has predictive power in some situations, time periods, and horizons (though it is also biased) and other papers that show that it does not have statistically significant predictive power at all. The consensus last time I checked was that implied volatility is no worse than historical volatility (including methods that use trends in historical volatility to forecast where it is going) at predicting future volatility.  Whether it is significantly better and whether either reliably predicts the future is something that is not agreed on.  I take this lack of consensus as evidence that if it does predict future volatility, it does so poorly. Somewhat dated FAJ survey on the subject Nah most of what the quants do is v. mathematics / theory heavy and not prog / cs heavy. It really depends whether you want a markets / stats focus or a programming focus.  Programming focus = CS style, development, implementing algo.s  Markets focus (where the $ is) = refining algos and working with devs, stats/research, more physics/maths-style work with a lot more scripting and empirical approaches to problem solving  Take it from someone in industry... you'll be fine just go out and get a job, they'll train you, start reading the FT for some background on markets and read up on basic financials e.g. what stock actually is, how it's prices, how markets actually function (structurally), how people price swaps and bonds, etc.