Weekly Options Crash Course for Options Expirations

When the weeklies were initially offered on standard stocks, you would have only the next week out option. The new option would be released on Thursday morning prior the current weekly option expiring on Friday.

So, for this month, if we were looking at a chain on October 30th, we would see an option expiring on NOV. 1st and would have available the standard expiration for NOV. 16th.

On October 31st, Thursday morning, we would see the new options available for today’s expiration on Nov. 8th.

Naturally, this Thursday, NOV. 7th, we would not see a new weekly option available as we would already have a series for NOV. 16th expiration.

Next Thursday, NOV. 14th, we would see the new weekly series available for expiration on NOV. 22nd, and so forth.

About a year ago the exchanges released the Continuous Weekly Series for some stocks and ETFs. This means that at any time you would have available 5 expiration cycles in a row. If we looked at one of those stocks on OCT 30th, we would have available:

NOV 1 expiration (Week 1)
NOV 8 expiration (Week 2)
NOV 16 expiration (standard)
NOV 22 expiration (Week 3)
NOV 29 expiration (Week 4)
DEC 21 expiration (Standard)
(also of course JAN 2014 Standard and other standard expiration dates)

On OCT 31st, the Thursday before the NOV 1 expiration, the DEC 6 series were released. So on Monday, NOV 5th, we would have:

NOV 8 expiration (Week 1)
NOV 16 expiration (standard)
NOV 22 expiration (Week 2)
NOV 29 expiration (Week 3)
DEC 6 expiration (Week 4)
DEC 21 expiration (Standard)
(also of course JAN 2014 Standard and other standard expiration dates)

As of last week there were:
265 securities that offer weekly options
211 of those were standard stocks
54 of those were indexes or ETFs.

Of those 265 securities that offer weekly options:
186 offer the Continuous Weekly Series
136 of those are standard stocks
50 indexes and ETFs offer the Continuous Weekly series

The number of securities offering weekly options and continuous weekly series continues to grow. We usually see new issues offering weekly options released the week after a standard expiration (in this case, NOV 21st. On NOV 21st I expect the totals of both numbers to grow).