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(*) – Asterisk means it is a composite price, including all option exchanges.
(N) – this is a non-standard, or special settlement option situations, and not used in back testing.
(Y) – Binary option
(W) - Weekly option
(Q) - Quarterly option
(P) - SPX PM Settled. Usually SPX is AM settled
(T) - Ten Shares per contract ("mini" options)
(J) - Jumbo (1000 shares per contract)

How are special option types noted in the exchange column?

Overview

We use the exchange column to indicate various situations. When using our data you should be aware of these indications. We will mark options that are binary, have non-standard delivery, are stale, or seem to be very odd. Please read below for details of each. Some of these types, such as non-standard options, and Jumbo options are only available in the SQL versions of the data.

Please note in recent years that weekly options have greatly increased and it has become difficult to distinguish which options are weekly. Originally in 2005, weekly options were issued 7 calendar days before they expired. And some monthly options issued 4 weeks before expiration. It was easy to distinguish between monthly options and weekly options. Fast forward to now. Weekly options can be issued more than a month before they expire. So the distinction between weekly and monthly options has become blurry. For SPX, this is especially the case and it would not be surprising that we could see daily expiring options for SPX, expiring every day of the week. So in your backtesting, DO NOT RELY on the exchange column to distinguish between weekly, monthly and quarterly options after 2012.

Why is the column called "exchange"? In the beginning of collecting and distributing historical option data, we included a column called “exchange”. The initial intent was that we might want to list quotes from individual exchanges. This never happened and the column was always marked with an asterisk (*), meaning that it was a consolidated price of all exchanges. Then within our first year we decided that we needed a way to indicate odd option types and non-standard options. Later, as newer types of options were created, we began marking these situations in the exchange column.

Non-standard delivery

Non-standard options are option contracts that are NOT 100 shares of stock, but also include other amounts of stock, other stocks, or cash dividends. A formal listing of these is maintained by the Options Clearing Corporation, and they call them the Equity Special Settlement reports. Non-standard options are marked in the exchange column as letter N.

Stale option quotes

Another case that occurs is that some options seem to become dormant before becoming de-listed. The same option will have the same bid, ask, volume repeated for many days in a row. In our end of day subscription service, we are marking these options with a value of R, for repeat. So if the option has a bid above zero, and has the same bid, ask for many days in a row, we do not delete them from the daily end of day service, but we mark them. However, when we process the whole month, while creating the historical data set, we do remove options out of the data set which have had the same value for the entire month.

Binary options

Some options are “coin flip” options. Either you win or lose a set amount. Please see the CBOE web site for further description.http://www.cboe.com/micro/binaries/introduction.aspx. We mark binary options in the exchange column with a value of Y. This is short for Yes/No options.

Repeats

The options prices seem to be repeating over several days.

A common question is, "If I just want to import standard options into a database, which ones should I import? Answer: Import all asterisk(*) and W (weekly) and Q (quarterly) symbols.