[ScottBurson]

Ah, very interesting. I had wondered how option writers managed their risk. I wonder how often this is the cause of the spikes I see on charts.

If word leaks that people are going to need to start hedging big then it could easily move 10 or 20 ticks away from you while waiting for your risk management team to approve your trade as not a fat finger.

That's why I would expect it to be done in software. Yes, I understand that software can be buggy, and hard-and-fast rules sometimes need to be bent, but I would still expect it to be cheaper overall. But I haven't actually worked in the business, so this is just my $.02 :-)

[log_n]

Heh it's options writers or buyers (just options market makers in general). A lot of stuff is electronically traded but there are still some very large orders with huge deltas that are put up on telephone calls.

And yeah it makes sense to have an extra prompt pop up if it's an order over X contracts or Y ticks from the market. And I've seen a lot of systems set up like that.

A lot of times traders will just punch the "OK" box and do their trade though.

That's of course if traders are manually hedging their portfolio/trade. A lot of times they just set their portfolio to auto-hedge based on certain parameters (ie at Z deltas or we've moved C ticks in a time period).