By Derald Muniz

For anyone that participates in the public stock markets, having a set of Tools to use within your trading process is vital. I use a wide variety myself, but thought I would highlight the CBOE website today as a place to gather a wealth of information on what is happening with Option activity daily.

One of the pages I frequent is the Most Actives page, here is how it looked on Friday:

I highlighted the activity in $DOW for the January 2014 expiration as it appears that someone opened a very large Call Spread using the 40 & 45 strikes – what I call a big footprint.

Another useful page is the Put/Call Ratios. Here is a snapshot of that page:

 

On the Tools page you can find the Volatility Optimizer which is worth spending some time with if you trade options: