Options Boot Camp 409: The Madness, Mystery and Mayhem of Expiration

And yet these days it's gotten kind of bizarre, a little bit arcane, a lot of minutiae thrown in there.

So I thought we'd dive into it.

Something we've had on the docket for a long time.

And Dan, it seems like now is the time to revisit the concept of expiration.

Quite simply, when do these freaking things that we're trading, Dan, when do they expire? Again, seem like an obvious and easy topic.

And indeed it was when I first walked.

On the trading floor in the late 90s, it was the dot-com bubble.

Options were hotter than they'd ever been until, of course, the pandemic.

People were lined up to pay $20,000 plus a month for a seat lease to get on the SIBO.

And there was a three-month waiting period for the privilege, Dan, of paying $20,000 plus a month.

to lease that so just back that in listeners 20 grand a month straight up out of the gate that's your starting cost plus everything else you got to pay for you got to pay for clerks you got to pay for commissions all those other things i got pretty expensive pretty quick You were well north of a grand a day, probably a couple of grand a day when you broke it all down just to break even to go down.

And this is back in the late 90s.

So wild times, Dan.

But in those go-go days, the concept of expiration was fairly straightforward, Dan.

When I first walked, my first pit was actually the SPX.

I was not out in the equity option.

So the SPX...

Played with a little bit different rules of engagement.

But back then, there was only one expiration.

It occurred on the third Friday of every month.

That was Expiration Friday, listeners.

And it was kind of a big deal because it only happened once a month.

You saw a lot of fun things happening.

on expiration Friday.

You saw a lot of people would sometimes clear out their positions, didn't have to deal with a lot of the noise.