Weekly options become popular

Weekly options become popular

Weekly options started trading on CBOE in 2005. All new weekly options listed on CBOE begin trading on Thursdays and expire the following Friday. This provides uniformity and also allows to easily “roll” weekly options from one expiration to another.

Weekly options full introduction:
http://www.cboe.com/micro/weeklys/introduction.aspx

As weekly options continue to see huge popularity, with SEC approval, ISE introduced tighter strike prices such as $0.50 intervals and as of Sept 2012 applied to 93 underlying securities previously in $1 strike intervals.

As VIX options, futures options and ETF options have been incredibly successful, weekly options are primarily available on the major indices, most liquid stocks, ETFs and individual equities. The current full list of available weekly options:
http://www.cboe.com/micro/weeklys/availableweeklys.aspx

All option chain including weekly options if available can be found, e.g., here:
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/option-chain

Weekly options offer much wider categories for Calendar Spread, with taking advantage of faster TV decay of near term expiration dates by buying far long term options and selling near term options. They also offer cheaper and affordable ways to bet big swings with limited risks such as ER play when appropriate. Typically, Weekly options of volatile and high-dollar stocks such as AAPL/GOOG/BIDU often offer great swings for technical traders.

Option's VALUE = IV+TV and Option Premium is most importantly affected by VOLATILITY. For more reading:

OPTION PRICING and how to use it for winning trades:
http://www.market-harmonics.com/option3.htm

Options are all about trade-offs between time and price, both (strike-)price-wise and time-wise. In general, price-acceleration factor (the rate of an option's sensitivity to underlying security's price change), an important concept for understanding option theory, is offered by rate of time value decay, and vise-versa, this principle binds option-time-wise and option-price-wise.

Price-wise:
Delta is simply a theoretical measurement of the rate at which an option gains or loses value when the underlying moves by $1.
Gamma is the delta of delta, how the delta of an option changes when the underlying changes by $1.

Time-wise:
Theta measures how fast TV of an option decays with time passing by on a given expiration date.

There is an inverse relationship between gamma and theta. It represents the trade-off between risk (time) and reward (price). Long a near-term option suffers a lot of time decay, but gets a lot of gamma – and its potential reward in terms of increasing delta – too (the time-price binding principle).

Option-strike-price-wise ATM/ITM/OTM:

1, ATM has the biggest TV, and its daily TV decays the fastest as well.
2, ATM has the largest price-acceleration factor (the largest gamma of strike-price-wise), offered by a high rate of TV decay (biggest theta).
3, OTM provides the most leverage (cheap), but can be correct on directional forecast and still lose money because of time decay. OTM has less TV overall than ATM, but on a percentage basis the TV decay each day may be a larger percentage of the total price of the option.
4, TV of ITM is the same as OTM. Deep ITM is just the same as the underlying security.

Option-expiration-wise:

A longer term option responds less sensitively to IV change (or underlying security price movement), because it has less price-acceleration factor (smaller gamma of time-wise), offered by a lower rate of TV decay (smaller theta).

More reading with examples:
When Options Near Expiration: A View of 3 Apple Options
http://ceoblog.zecco.com/2011/03/when-options-near-expiration-a-view-of-3-apple-options/