(IBKR Desktop) The price that matters is the -0.42...no idea what the 3.9 bid, 5.0 ask has to do with... On the order ticket there is no mention of the -0.42 price of the butterfly, and the qty and bid/ask make no sense. How any developer can look at this and go, "yep, that looks good", is beyond me... (TD bank active trader/TOS) This is what an order ticket should look like:
That -0.42 is price change... Innit? Edit: I see what you mean, I have a 46 cent mid on ibkr mobile app
5.0 if you are buying (and you want the position to be filled). 3.9 if you are selling (and you want the position to be filled). Enter something in between if a fill isn't important.
Is this a serious question? The -0.42 is today's change in MARA, the underlying. 3.9x5.0 is the bid/offer on your 10-lot fly, because for some reason, you chose to set up your structure as buying 1-lot of a 10x20x10 fly, instead of buying 10-lots of a 1x2x1 fly, like most people would do. If you set it up as a 1x2x1 fly, the bid/offer would be 0.39x0.50
So its even worse lol...by coincidence it just happened to be the same as the bid price. Are you the developer or something??? Its a 10/20/10 butterfly created using their own strategy builder. Why would I want to buy 10 lots of 1/2/1 flies? So if I do 100 I have to do 100 lots of 1/2/1 instead of just 100/200/100? That's idiotic. It's a 10/20/10 with a limit price of 0.42 just like on the TOS order ticket. Why should the lots fing matter anyway? Just put .39x.50 as the price...I don't need them to x10x100 it for me, as it is obvious in the premium. No matter how you look at it, its an ambiguous mess...TOS does it right.
Either way is acceptable but the most common is the basic structure 1/2/1 * how many flies you want - 10, 100 or whatever. Similar to shares basic amount is one share but you go to market to buy 100 of those 1 shares. I think you are getting lost in the weeds here, go back and read what poopy has said to you in your fly thread. You have to be able to predict something to make money on flies either predicting a drop in vol or a price target at the body. Why trade X no. of flies when a single straddle will have a similar payoff under 1.5 sigmas.
Yeah but this is just about an order ticket that makes no sense and over complicates things. Think or swim is the most popular trading platform out there especially for option strategies so follow their lead. Yes pick a target at the body or as D did after poaching my TA where he traded for the credit on puts instead. The straddle is too expensive to make money without at least a 2sd move ..strangles are even worse because of theta decay. D had the right idea...trade for the credit not the debit.