GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

The one-dollar.us Options Scalper was another project that had a lot of potential during its time, but would have required some startup capital (VC attention) and more care and nurturing in order to really get off the ground.  Now I feel like the guys at Quantopian are quite on the right track, but they too have recognized that designing an intuitive interface for stock options analysis will be difficult... plus there's just so much data!!!  Nevertheless, Dan Dunn at Quantopian seemed to like the interface I provided, but they're designing the interface I ultimately wanted to provide so I'm just going to let them finish it up. ;)  (Plus, they know a little more Python than I do, which seems a great programming language choice for this task.) The scalper was designed as a means to learn and study option decay in a graphical manner.  As weekly options were relatively new back in 2011, I decided those would be a great target because there's not a lot of data you nee...

Publicly-traded stocks and other equities often feature options, which are essentially derivatives of the motion of the underlying equity.  Stock options are also publicly-traded (unless you're at a company that still gives stock options as performance bonuses).  They allow individuals to reduce risk in their portfolio, or (infinitely more fun) to speculate on the movement of the underlying stock or equity.  There are two forms of options, and just like regular equities, two ways to play them.  In American-style markets, you are free to exercise options at any point prior to expiration.  I'll spare you a crash-course in options, since you can get the jist of how they work in many other places. However, many tutorials gloss over a glaringly obvious fact that must not be intuitive to many people, based on my personal experience.  It's also extremely simple:   It is never optimal to actually exercise a call early , unless the underlying stock is about t...

Just to clarify: it won't work now without significant attention from the right people. Bitcoin would stand to benefit from some type of options or futures market, as these instruments help people mitigate their risk in other assets when used properly (yes, I'm looking at you, Dick Fuld ).  Currently the only way you can protect yourself from losses in BTC is to sell at the right time, and everyone knows timing any market is very hard to do.  (Well, not so hard---just sell next time someone hacks the system, as it starts falling, then buy again in about 24 hours.  It's tricky to actually pull off, though, when currently one exchange handles most of the transactions and basically falls apart during high volume.) Apparently, due to the denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, within the past few weeks, folks have been looking to create an open-source trading platform that will allow anyone to make their own BTC exchange with all the be...