Why do the option chains shown in relation to stocks in my Yahoo portfolios only show a limited amount of pric

Question

For example one stock has options which expire in April but Yahoo only shows options expiring in March, May August etc.but leaves out April.

Answer 1

Most options are offered quarterly. However, front (current) month options are also available.

Thus for the stock you're talking about, I'd expect to see Feb, May, Aug, Nov options, plus the front month options. Since Feb's expired, we'd now have Mar, May, Aug, and Nov.

For options that are Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct, you'd see Mar, Apr, Jul, and Oct.

In two weeks when the Mar options expire, new Apr options will become available to go along with the May, Aug, and Nov ones from your example. At that time you'll have Apr, May, Aug, and Nov!

Now if you had a Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct stock and Apr didn't show up, then that'd be a glitch.

Hope that helps!


Additional Edit - I inadvertantly left out the plus one. It is front plus one which is a horrible oversight considering I look at these tables every day. It's just typically I'm already assuming current front month is there and so my front month is the +1 that I look at if I want more time for a short term move.

Total brain fart. My apologies for the oversight.

It's the 2nd month (the +1) that gets added after options expire.

Ok, back to your question. One other possibility is that if there's very low volume/activity, then the market maker might not create the other month's options. For instance, HANS was non-optionable for the longest time and then offered options, but after the big split, it pulled back and many people lost interest in trading that stock via options. So now, no more options again. It started by offering fewer and fewer options to trade. ;-)

Answer 2

The previous answer was correct about there beign different cyckes for different options, but incorrect in describing how the cycles work. The two front months are always available which, today, would mean March and April should be available as well as two far months.

To see which months should be available (excluding LEAPS, if any), see the cycle schedule at

http://www.cboe.com/TradTool/strikepricecode.aspx

There are two possible reasons that April strikes are no showing up in Yahoo.

The first, and least likely, is that the options for the underlying are being delisted for some reason. (The most common reasons are that the undelying stock no longer has enough trading activity, market cap, or diversity in ownership.) When options are delisted for a company existing options continue to trade but no new options for the stock are created.

The second, and more likely, reason is simply that Yahoo screwed up. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for Yahoo to leave out existing options in their option chains or, even worse, include options that do not exist. I don't know why they so much more trouble than other sites, but they do. The way around the problem is to use another source for your quotes. I recommend the CBOE delayed quotes service at

http://www.cboe.com/DelayedQuote/QuoteTable.aspx