Stocks & Commodities V. 25:2 (68-71): Product Review: Optionstar 2 by David Penn

Stocks & Commodities V. 25:2 (68-71): Product Review: Optionstar 2 by David Penn

It is difficult to fathom it has been five years since I last took a look at Optionstar, Jesse Chen’s innovative option analysis software based on Microsoft Excel. Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES was contacted recently by Chen, who asked if we would be interested in bringing our readers up to speed on the various enhancements and expanded capabilities he and his developers have brought to the software. Given the rise in interest in options trading among retail traders — and the length of time since we last discussed Optionstar — bringing the software back on stage seemed like a no-brainer.

So what’s new with Optionstar — or more accurately, Optionstar 2 — that merits renewed attention? At its most basic, the changes to Optionstar 2 include a fairly significant display overhaul. In some ways, however, the current version of Optionstar 2 bears only passing, Excel-related resemblance to its predecessor.

Optionstar 2, for example, contains just three main tabs (not including the “title” tab, which consists mostly of an end-user agreement and instructions on how to download data). These tabs each link to a different worksheet. One, labeled “chn,” is for options chains (Figure 1). The worksheet contains three main areas. In the upper left corner of the worksheet is the data entry area where traders enter the symbol for the underlying asset, the expiration month, and select from the different datafeed options. The current price of the underlying (or the delayed price) will be posted, as will the volatility and the time of the last price quote (again, because of the delayed nature of the free data). Optionstar offers four free delayed stock option datafeeds and one free end-of-day futures option datafeed.