Hi Ernie,

Yeah I have access to L2, but it's for stocks, not options.  I can only get streaming options quotes from my broker if I trade 20 options, but I have yet to trade any options.  I want to educate myself first before I start investing any real money.

But in the stocks I've been looking at, the premiums don't change that often.  I get real-time quotes for the options...just not streaming...and when I refresh, they don't change that much.  So I was assuming as a start point that the volatility of the quotes was the least of my worries.

I just want to be able to plan a transaction and anticipate what might happen, and calculate when to take profit or minimize a loss.  And I want to do this AHEAD OF TIME, instead of having to sit in front of my computer and watch every tick in real time.  With stocks, I have a sense of where the price is going, I have mental stops and I know where I should take profit.  But I don't have that with options, and it seems no one else does since they usually just cite rules like, "always use the highest delta", or "with covered calls, always go slightly OTM", but they can't explicate any real plan for when one should liquidate an option, roll up or roll down.  Maybe I'm reading these people wrong, but they don't seem to use a spreadsheet, but rather are "winging it".  That seems like dangerous territory to me -- pouring out money without a safety net.  If that's the way options trading is, I'll take a pass on it except for basic puts and calls, since I don't throw money around unless I can anticipate what might happen to it.

And that requires a spreadsheet or something similar.

Is the bottom line really that options aren't amenable to spreadsheets? You just have to work with certain principles - implied volatiliy, historical volatility, the Greeks, etc.  - and with some muddy sense of that in mind, go ahead and roll the dice and hope for the best?