Weekly Expiration Tags/Codes

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In today’s take five segments, I know we haven’t done one in a couple of days just because I’ve been sick and losing my voice.

But in today's take five segments, what I wanted to talk about is the differences between different weekly contracts and how they're tagged in broker systems as far as how you can tell which ones are weeklies and which ones aren’t.

When you look at Thinkorswim, obviously it’s easy just to see which contracts are those weeklies here and that’s because they’re tagged just weekly.

But in some broker platforms, they don't have this highlighting here of weekly, and you don't know which contracts disseminate towards which expiration date. It’s actually a lot easier than it seems. Here’s what I want to do.

When we go over this, just make sure that you take your time in trying to understand this. It’s very, very simple to understand, the weekly contracts and when they expire.

I’ll take Priceline for example and just because it has no mini contracts or no weird contracts going. But you'll see here the first one listed is NOV1 14. You’ll notice that mostly all of these contracts have 14 until we start getting out of here to 15, 16, 17 which are longer term contracts.

But this NOV1 14, that means that this contract is a weekly contract that expires the first week (that’s why it says NOV1) of November. This contract would expire on Friday, the first week in November of 2014, hence the 14.

If we go down here, then you can see there's NOV2. NOV2s are weekly contracts that will expire the second week of November. The second week of November 2014, those contracts will expire.

And then you get to the monthly contracts, and you can see that it says NOV and there’s no number next to it. There’s no 1 or 2 next to it; it’s just NOV 2014. Those are the regular monthly contracts for Priceline.

As we know, monthly contracts in options always expire the third week of the month. Whatever that third Thursday, Friday is the month, that's when those contracts will expire.

Let’s go here to a calendar real quick. And I just brought up… This is November, so let me just scooch it down into the window here. You can see this is November and those first contracts expire the first week of November. Remember those NOV1s?

This is the expiration week that we’re dealing with it. Those next contracts expire this week which is the second week of expiration, and you can see just on the calendar how easy it is, those NOV1 and NOV2.

This one would be NOV1 up here and this contract week would be NOV2 right here. The regular monthly contracts are going to be this third week which is NOV and then no dissemination of 1, 2 or 3 because that’s going to be the third week in November, so it’s going to be the monthly contract expiration.

If we go back here to the chart, after the November regular monthly contracts here, then what we have is we have the last week in November which is NOV4. Now you can see how easy it is that now that NOV4 means the fourth week in November, those weekly options are going to expire.

And then after that, there are no more weeks in November, so then we get into December 1 which is DEC1, December, DEC2 and then the regular December contracts which are those monthly contracts in Thinkorswim not tagged as December.

Hopefully, that was easy. These take five video segments are hopefully geared towards giving you guys some little takeaways and actionable things that you can use, and they only take five minutes out of your day, so that you can learn one cool thing about options trading. As always, I hope you guys enjoy and happy trading!