The Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) is a group composed of representatives of participating securities exchanges with the responsibility of offering last-sale option quotes as well as information about the participating exchanges.
As a national system program, OPRA oversees the process through which market participants exchange data, collect and distribute market data. The two main OPRA data feeds comprise trades(last sale reports for complete transactions in securities) transactions) in addition to quotations(bids and offer for option).
Understanding OPRA
The Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) splits the services it provides into two major areas: a fundamental service for all options , with the exception of foreign currency derivatives as well as the “FCO service” to provide options in foreign currencies information. The company comprises its services as follows: Boston Options Exchange (BOX), Cboe Options Exchange, International Securities Exchange (ISE), Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), Miami International Securities Exchange, NYSE Arca, the NYSE American as well as Nasdaq BX Option. 2
The quotes from every exchange are then compiled using OPRA’s feeds in order to produce the nationwide best bid and offer (NBBO) quote.
More casually more formally, more casually, Options Price Reporting Authority serves as an industry-led group that supports the accurate and timely creation and dissemination data on the market data. Particularly, for more obscure financial instruments like listed options and other securities. In the background the activities and data supplied from the Options Price Reporting Authority go far in enhancing market liquidity as well as other factors making market efficiency. In the absence of these data and information supplied by OPRA and the capital markets, they would not be as advanced, resulting in an increase in the costs for capital saving as well as the borrowers.
Reading Options Quotes
Options come with a unique language of their own. And when you first begin trading options and options, the information can be overwhelming. If you are looking at an option quote, it might appear as rows of incomprehensible numbers, however options quotes, also known in the form of option chains are a valuable source of information regarding the security’s current state and the direction it is moving in the near future.As an example of an option chain that has quotes supplied by OPRA take a look at the following example from Apple, Inc. The left column displays the ticker of an option. In this case, it’s all calls that have different strikes that expire in the month of August of 2019. Then, the last trade time bid, asking price, the final price and change are all displaced together with volume, as well as the cost’s implied volatility for the particular option.
