I think you may at times want to send a bunch of bulk updates, like "I've got bids and asks in on these dates at these strikes, for this strike and date, update / reset all my bids and asks." This bears a little more consideration, I think. Let's start with the first two and see what needs we have.

Thanks for the head's up re: SPF, will do.

I also propose:

updateAllStrikeBids:
  strike
  underlying
  type
  date
  bidask=optional
  num=optional
  expireTime=optional

updateAllDateStrikeAsks:
  strike
  underlying
  type
  date
  bidask=optional
  num=optional
  expireTime=optional


I would anticipate even a vaguely sophisticated bot is going to tier out its bids/asks, so this second set might or might not be useful, but I want to make sure to support a sort of 'everything in this line should change' function.

Damien brought up expire times on bids; makes sense for this situation, along with a trading halt.

I added in a server time countdown today for just such a reason; and the server is on UTC / GMT. So we're locked in currently at London -1 (It's British Daylight Time right now).

If you click your name, you will see some options, including (I believe) one called Payment API. Just turn them all on; as far as I know, there are no security risks in doing so.

Once you do that, you'll be able to send money to an email address.

I just cleared one this week for someone; please put your account name in the notes section. .

OK, So let's agree on some functionality here.

There's no point in changing the strike of a bid, plus we may tie margin logic to different strike prices, so

updateBid:
  token
  bidId
  bidask(optional)
  expiredate(optional)
  cancelifbtcusdgt(optional)

updateAsk:
  token
  askId
  bidask(optional)
  expiredate(optional)
  cancelifbtcusdgt(optional)

 
Expire dates are relatively easy. Stop Loss prices have a whole bunch of problems, including (but not limited to):

. Possible manipulation some day when the options market grows
. Thin markets in down trading times
. Mt Gox websockets / order book functionality is not perfect and might miss something
. Significant database load; we're essentially queuing an update / delete on every websocket notice. This may be non-scalable.


There's also the question of what you actually do with the them once expired; I'd say they should stick around and get annotated 'canceled when blah happened.'  A good 25% of support questions are currently "what happened to my XXX?" Of those, 20% have been the market so far, the rest are people just being confused, bad interface, or memories.

The more I think about it, the more I think the bid bot should be responsible for keeping track of Gox, or Tradehill, or wherever. I'll shoot you some python websockets code that you can include in the bot for just such a purpose; I think I have your e-mail right?

Damien, I would love to have you work on a sort of canonical trading bot; are you open to doing that? I will happily support you as you get your head around it. The APIs are published online (and in the bitoption API thread here), and I have a few unpublished - but available - ones that will help.

What would be great would be something on github that people could fork and add their own intelligence to.

E-mail me if you need help getting started.

I'm totally excited about that offer, thanks!

Update

We finished out our first close date with only minor drama; I set up to manually expire the first date, then missed my own deadline, so Options Exercisers got an extra 25 minutes to exercise. I'll check the logs and see if anybody did this; then reimburse for any value delta.

Our Mt. Gox trading connection is still flaky; this has turned out to be one of the hardest parts of the system. I'm now running four virtual servers and they need to periodically claim a new token from Gox; I don't think anyone was harmed by this bug this time around, but by next week, we'll have a more resilient system in place. Mt. Gox seems to have shortened the time they'll accept your token, and combined with the DDOS protection there, we had a little bit of excitement today. Magical Tux was up past midnight in Japan helping make sure we stayed live, which he absolutely did not have to do. (THANKS!)

Your BTC / USD are all released now, so go forth and bet again on next week, I know I will be. : ).

I have a draft of a working margin / buy and sell-to-cover savvy / auto-execution system. I'm going to post it for comments; as it stands, it will not be too terribly difficult to implement. I do not know how to insure against all market depth risks, so I would like to discuss this a little bit with everyone before we move ahead. That said, I'm sold on the idea of being able to offer up to your total available BTC/USD on any contract type as a way to fill the market out. We'll want more than one person to do that, of course. : ).

Brendio, I'm pretty sure sneakiness is fundamental to the option-trader lifestyle... That said, we all appreciate your forbearance, I'm sure. : ) I do believe a trading halt would make sense; 24 hours? 12 hours? I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks all for the really fun and exciting first week. More coming, no doubt.

Yep, and clicking the link in your sig.

Looks down from here.

Lots of updates here:

Buy to cover / sell to cover: coming.
I added color coding for ITM options, helps the board a bit, I'd say.

"Netting" your options for available funds makes sense, BUT we would also need to restrict exercising them in certain cases; I want to make sure the logic is correct.

Server time: Python and UTC is a surprising pain in the ass. We're currently reporting the correct time as far as we know it; synced up not infrequently by the server, and accurate to within a second or two from your browser through to our app server and database server.

I'm hearing the margin requests, and I agree it would bulk up the market. I'm going to sit down with a pad of paper and diagram out some logic today to see how this can be done.

Price history is going in shortly; that will be nice, I agree.

I've started putting out ads for python programmers to help; there's more than a fulltime job of stuff to do. In the interim, I'm just trying to knock off the biggest needs first, and keep working down the list.


Reminder We do not auto-exercise in-the-money options at expiration; you must do that yourself. Click on "My Contracts" and use the "Exercise" link. If you do not have the cash to exercise them all at once, you will exercise as many as you have funds for. You MUST then exchange and continue the exercising process; since Mt. Gox is not always highly liquid, this might impact the intrinsic value of your options.

Just make sure you have cash in before the next major media event.

Awesome!

Things in progress right now:


. "Pick up" a bid/ask directly from the board
. rewrite of the sessions system. booo...
. collecting final comments on simple binary options before launch
. Review with legal counsel next monday to sort domicile issues


Mid-term
Still deciding between bots, buy-to-cover, margin?, stop-loss..

Strike price controls are almost certain to go in place.
It looks like there's demand for weekly options, so I'll probably keep those for now.

Thanks for all your trust, folks!

A quick market review; we're growing in liquidity, slowly; after the initial interest surge, people are waiting to see how the market works, I think. Roughly 2/3 of the money in the market is on the sidelines right now, so there's more liquidity waiting there for the right circumstances.

The vast majority of options (75%) are currently out of the money, which is to say that writers have done better than bidders so far. Overall the bent looks long on the exchange, I think we're still waiting for the shorts to get their USD cycled through Gox and over to us, so we may say some better short offers out there soon.

Good luck all, and happy trading!

Back up.

Our Site is down while Gox gets back on its feet post-DDOS.

Normally we can function in 'reduced functionality' mode, but the error checking isn't quite good enough to catch the current circumstance.

Updates here as it comes.

Hans, as you say!

However, we'll get there; there will be a tipping point in terms of usefulness, and until then, it will take a little more work to make the money.

Re: Money, yes, if you have no BTC, it takes some time to get some, and then send over. I'm guessing you guys are super-bears, so you only wish to be in BTC for a few moments max.

That would be fabulous..

OK, so we could just take commission on any offer that picks up other offers. Unfilled offers get no commission. I'll have to see what that would take on the backend. My gut is that it won't be too difficult.

I no longer believe the session bug is fixed.

I _THINK_ the session bug is fixed now.