Option charts/history

[aaaapolon]

Are any of you aware of a site one can go to get the historical price action for options?

So far I have been constrained to simply writing the daily prices flucuations on a ledger but this severely limits the time available to act on thse things due to the necessity to track them over an extended period of time to get an accurate picture of their behavior

Thanks in advanced

[acajuxinij]

OptionsXpress has historical prices on options, but only if you have an account with them. tradestation also has it for their customers, and in addition has the charts on the individual options.

As for a "free" site, I am not aware of one.

[adavisvenu]

MCD, there are some data relevance problems with historical option prices:


You can get high/low/open/close prices, but these prices have meaning only when paired with the prices of the underlying asset. Sure, you can get HLOC prices for the underlying asset, but you lose a lot by not seeing how one varied with the other.
Moreover, a given option has a limited life. Some live 90 days or less from creation to expiry. That limits the value of option prices for time series analysis.

That is not to say that option price history is of no value. You can certianly learn, for example about the tendency of a stock to 'pin' at an option strike price near expiry.
For my money, though, I'd rather track implied volatility. And having said that, I'd like to track the historic volatility of the stock over the same time period. I think I would learn more from that information than from the option price itself.

Why do you want option price history? What did you plan to do with that information? [Note, this isn't a 'loaded' question. "I just wanted to see what the data looked like," is a valid answer.]

[AgrikGex]

Thank you both for your replies. Florida, that is pretty much what I figured since it seems ot be what I am up against.

Netwrangler, I wouldn't have a problem with simply the HLOC and being able to historically chart this much like that of a stocks. If I had this information I could couple it with the copious price charts of the underlying security littered all over the web and get a feel for the premium one can expect to pay for the options. Obviously the intent here would be to catch Wall St. napping and get a crack at a few options trading with minimal premium. Also, I'd like to see exactly how the derivitive behaves when the underlying moves up or down. Do you know of such a site that provides this for free?

[afoqafozurer]

Peter Hoadley has a fair amount of tools available for free on-line use. The full Excel add-in package is not free, however. The current price is $110AUD [Hoadley is based in Australia and prices in Australian Dollars.]

I bought the package and made back the price easily and quickly.
Still, you can learn a lot with the free on-line tools.

I think you are on the right track. You just have to get hip-deep in the data to understand and internalize how options behave relative to the underlying stock and relative to market conditions.
On the Hoadley site, follow the on-line calculators link. That takes you to the free stuff.
When you understand the information those calculators are giving you, you will be in the top 1 of options experts on the Online Traders Forum.