Options Mailbag: Managing Positions Real-Time

This week's Option Mailbag will address some recent questions regarding how to find real-time data and backtesting strategies. I'll conflate two recent queries on these related topics into what I hope is one relatively complete answer.

Hello Steven, I was hoping you could provide some input on what is the best way (relatively affordable or inexpensive) to manage an options portfolio in terms of seeing the greek pricing characteristics in real-time. Thanks, Rick.

Rick, if you work in office building that requires spending more than five minutes a day in an elevator, then you might be familiar with the "Captivate" TV screens installed in many of these vertical people transporters.

Captivate leverages peoples' aversion to making eye contact by offering 15-second snippets of headline news, weather and the occasional offbeat news story ... trust me, I'm getting to my point ... and through Captivate the other day, I was dismayed to learn that the old saw that "people only use 10% of their brain" is scientifically untrue.

Apparently studies, which include MRI, CAT scans and other testing, show that nearly 90% of the brain is always showing some form of activity. This is blow to those who have tried to get by on the theory that they are sitting on a huge reservoir of brain power, but it is located in difficult-to-tap regions.

The same could be said for the way many of us, myself included, use only a fraction of the trading tools and information placed smack in our frontal lobe, while allowing the rest to lay dormant. It's just a matter learning what is available, tapping into this information and learning how to use it.

If you have an online account in which you trade options, I'm pretty sure you are receiving real-time prices and have access to position- and portfolio-management tools.

The first place to start is in the option chain. That is the page that shows you all the current -- and they should be live market -- quotes for any given stock. This page typically consists of several columns, and even more rows.

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Steven Smith writes regularly for TheStreet.com. In keeping with TSC's editorial policy, he doesn't own or short individual stocks. He also doesn't invest in hedge funds or other private investment partnerships. He was a seatholding member of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) from May 1989 to August 1995. During that six-year period, he traded multiple markets for his own personal account and acted as an executing broker for third-party accounts. He appreciates your feedback; click here to send him an email.

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