Incredibly good bet!!! Congrats all around. I made the opposite bet (whoops!) but on a much smaller scale. A tiny 300-270 put spread that lasted 2 days. Then, right before the earning, exactly 7 minutes before 4pm, I kid you not, I had a premonition. Something in my head said "Get out get out get out". So I closed out my spread, pocketed my measly gain of $775 and walked out the door to pick up my kid from school. So I'm back home at 4:30pm, I just login to ib for curiosity sake, just to see what would have happened if I had stuck to my guns. Jesus Mary & Joseph I was so shell shocked...would have lost well over 50K if I hadn't pulled the trigger !!! I was so glad I danced a jig & took my kid out for icecream. He wanted to know why, but explaining all this shit...$775 profit over 2 days for pushing a couple of buy & sell buttons & narrowly avoiding a major, major $50,000 loss. Definite icecream day. I just said Daddy is happy lets buy icecream.

That seems a pretty smart short (in retrospect). I guess you were banking on them releasing concrete numbers on the iOS changes and people panicking from it? Seems really obvious in retrospect and relies on pretty common knowledge so I'm surprised that worked so straightforward. Good job.

I've noticed they stopped showing ads from actual businesses. Instead, it was sponsored posts from individuals self-promoting for purely vain reasons as opposed to some commercial reason.

I thought you could not short stocks in an Ira, only sell covered calls? Is there some way around this rule?

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10311...

You can do Level 2 options trading in a IRA.

So you can sell covered puts / calls, or buy puts /calls. Those do not require margin. You cannot sell uncovered calls / puts, which would require margin.

Part of my position was buying $280 weekly puts which were $1.39 each, now $49.5 each ( still haven't sold lol).

thx!

options, maybe?

Yea sounds like put options, an outright short wouldn’t have gained that much %

On a more general note, anyone know of any good guides/articles describing these sorts of bets? I often have a sense of where a stock price will go but have no idea how to take advantage.

Just note, the poster most probably did not actually 'short' facebook, the poster used options to do this. Its pretty simple for the buy case.

Options have a strike price and an expiration date. You buy a CALL option, with a strike price, that gives you an option to buy that stock for that price. Or you can buy a PUT option, that gives you the option to sell at that strike price.

Example using made up numbers. FB is $240. You look on the options tab and you can see various expiration dates. Lets pick 3 months out. You may see a Call option for a strike of $250 for $20. That means that you have until 3/4/2022 to exercise that option, if FB is trading for > $260, you will make a profit. ($240 + $20). If FB doesn't trade you make nothing.

Puts work similarly. The strike would just be $230. Note, you don't have to exercise, if next week FB goes to $300, your call's value will skyrocket to ~$60-70. You can sell the option any time, you don't have to wait.

You may have noticed the cost of the option is greater than the delta between the exercise price and the value of the share. In my example this is roughly due to the time between now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks, this is called beta-decay.

> In my example this is roughly due to the time between now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks, this is called beta-decay.

I think you mean theta decay. Theta is the time factor of an option's value.

Beta is, roughly, a comparison of a security's (or portfolio's) volatility versus market vol.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beta.asp

Beta decay is studied in a completely different industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay

Thanks, it was theta, I had it explained to me first as beta, and it stuck in my mind that way.