The Stock Market Moose
27Jun/110

Option Screener

Here is the stock options screener. If you view source and goto the iframe src there are actually a lot more options and search criteria. I just had to make a slimmed down view to fit reasonably within this blog theme.

It uses a lot of ajax calls which make the interface pretty great, but that also makes it pay a search ranking penalty. If you find this useful, do me a favor and give it a link.

Some detail: after getting the data, making minor modifications to the structures, then seeing how long some of the results took to load I realized it needed to be faster. For now I have a multi-tiered caching system that will reuse results that are less than something like 3 hours old. Initial loads can still be a little slow, but subsequent loads within the 3 hour ttl are pretty quick. Loading multiple tickers works pretty smoothly until there are over around 5,000 rows of options data. Caching cant fix this. I need to re-assess the data structures, filtering, and sorting. A lot of it is deferred to php code. If I moved all the attributes needed to create the filtered views to a database and did the filtering and sorting in database calls it would most likely improve the performance greatly. I personally think its the best options screener available. But I am still a little fearful to test the waters of options again, feels like playing with fire. You could definitely use it to potentially find low premiums for married-puts, which seems like a pretty boring way to use some great new options analyzer - boring is often good when it comes to investing.

tags: options, stock options, puts, calls, screener, intrinsic value, premium, finviz, google finance

7Jul/100

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