My last options feature review & QoL request (Options comms are actually cheaper?)

Will be entering NS soon so i doubt i'll have any time to do more articles on Moomoo's current options features and what they're lacking from major competitors.

Anyways, since this is probably my last big post in awhile, I'll also talk about options commissions, minor bugs and QoL changes.

Firstly, something new i noticed is the expiration probability analysis tool.

This is an existing feature on thinkorswim and other trading platforms known as a probability cone.

Typically it's overlaid on top of the chart like on other platform implementations, in fact this may be what's used in their trend projection tool, however the tool is worded such that it makes no mention of options, so this is likely not the case, but rather something they may be able to mix together.

Moomoo should also consider adding this cone to the actual charts itself as it makes visualization easier for those who use it.

It should also have an explanation/information button as tbh its not intuitive to understand at first glance. (Note: the information does exist on mobile, but not on Desktop)

Lastly, of the new feature additions, Moomoo has released the full morningstar report for various stocks, for free.

The new "Full report" button can be found in the Morningstar page under Valuation. This is on Moomoo NX, but you can also view the full report on the mobile app, just scroll all the one down while in the Morningstar Research page.

Yes, it looks exactly like an actual, professionally-written report, and from what i can gather, seems to be quite recent ones too, however this is a version I downloaded in April, so they may have a new one for May now.

Regardless, its a really nice service to have access to for free, there's actually some stocks that don't show alot of information unless you download the report, so the full report being accessible is nice, you can even download them as I've done for Nvidia's.

Now, with feature additions out of the way, let's talk about something I just recently noticed.

As an avid options trader, i've placed a couple hundred trades and orders since I started back in early 2024. Now that it's been one year, I decided to review everything and found something rather interesting.

This contract, at a price of 30.3 will cost us 3,030 USD.

Taking a look at the options fee, it displays 2.94 USD in fees for buying.

And 3.04 USD in fees for selling.

Now let's see the cost in fees for 100 of this contract.

The cost is now about 216.69 USD.

If you've been observant, you'd realize that the largest contribution to the fees are "Option settlement fees", followed by commissions and platform fees.

I don't personally see that big of an issue with the commission and platform fees, especially if you're doing single-legged trades as these are subsidized by the commision-free coupons.

The main issue is that the Option settlement fees are sure to turn off anybody who was planning on trading options.

Not to mention you're not even told where exactly those fees come from or how it's calculated, as a matter of fact it doesnt even exist on other brokerages such as Webull or Tiger brokers, or rather they'll tell you how much they cost instead of generalizing them into a blanket term.

Moomoo's option pricing vs Webull, for Moomoo they DO specify a little bit on what the settlement fees are for, and explain why I will later notice how the actual settlement fees are lower than expected, but they can be more transparent about it as Webull doesnt seem to charge it.

As you can see from my own P&L spreadsheet, using the Commission (Excluding any rebates) and Qty columns, i've averaged out the commission fee for 1 contract to be approximately 2.24 USD.

This 2.24 is lower than what's estimated by Moomoo, at 2.94 USD.

This is applicable even on larger orders as back when I accidentally ordered 35 contracts instead of 100 shares (will write a section on this too.) I incurred a commission of about 40-50 bucks per buy/sell transaction, this is roughly half the stated amount of ~80 bucks per buy/sell transaction.

Coupled with the coupon rebate of ~23 bucks, I actually had a relatively low commission fee compared to what was shown.

Also just an fyi that the commissions are scaled off quantity and not valuation.

That's all I wanted to say about commissions, while the commissions are understated, its important to know that if you use multi-legged options, it is really expensive to trade options, compared to other brokers like Webull, IKBR or Tastytrade.

Do note that for Webull, they restrict which strategies you can use, and for Tastytrade, you may incur transfer costs.

As mentioned before, I came across an accident where I bought option contracts instead of shares, this occured as on Moomoo NX, when you view an option in the option chain and then go back to the stock's chart and click on quick trade, Moomoo will display the option contracts for purchase instead of the shares.

Of course this was a fault on my part, but its quite unintuitive to be on the chart, quick trade, and still be on options.

Just a reminder to anybody who trades using the quick trade button, whoops.

Accidents aside, some options QoL features could be added, such as position history for rolled positions, as well as "price snapshots".

It would be nice for Moomoo to add a feature that lets us view past positions we've had on a stock, and if there was a rolled position (closed and opened in a single order), it should appear connected to each other and have a shared P&L.

This is similar to tastytrade's implementation.

You can see here how past positions are tied together and identified as a roll, this helps alot in remembering position changes. I think this may be hard for Moomoo to replicate without blatantly copying, but it shouldnt be difficult to just categorize connected positions together in an easy-to-view manner.

As a matter of fact, Moomoo already categorizes positions by the type of strategy, they just need to add more chains that show how it rolled into a new position.

If you imagine these two positions are on the same underlying, the chains shown on the left could maybe be connected in some way to indicate that it was a "rolled" position.

Of course, they would need to display this per underlying, or improve the UI of the trade history panel, as its very weird with actual, filled orders being stuck on the bottom.

Another feature that could be added are price snapshots, such as the price in which the position was opened at, the price it was at when we rolled, and the price it's currently at, of course this is not rlly an industry common feature so a different implementation would be required, but if possible, maybe having options appear on the charts as well just like stocks would do the same thing.

Another feature that could be added is the ability to roll options or view the option's current probability curve, as is possible on Moomoo.

Not sure why these two things are missing from the main desktop app.

Another thing that's still missing from the main desktop app, are visualizations for various financial data, on the mobile version, we get charts for financial indicators, but those dont exist on desktop yet.

Lastly, I think knowing the Beta correlation of a stock to the general market would be quite helpful to traders of all types, just having this information anywhere on the stock, maybe in the options panel alongside other data would be a nice touch to avoid correlation risk between tickers.

Just a rlly funny thing i noticed, the "price probability" on the options curve doesnt do anything.

It adds this rlly small line near the current price and honestly seems like its based off the 0DTE volatility, as it shows 100% chance of going up and down lol.

The volatility analysis graph also seems to be missing the Earnings indication too, it used to tell you the points in the chart when earnings released to visualize IV crush, but seems to be either bugged or not working (or maybe never existed in the first place).

Oh and i'll be learning calculus, how to use Moomoo's API and python for finance whenever im free, so maybe i'll make a post on those someday.