About the Author
I’m Ezra. I have been trading options since 2008. My first desk was in Korea’s stock index options market — one of the most actively traded derivatives markets in the world at the time. Over the following years the work extended to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and finally mainland China, where I now focus on market making and proprietary trading in listed options: ETF options, stock index options, and commodity options.
Trading listed options in China means living inside the machinery. The exchanges impose continuous-quoting obligations, position limits, and settlement rules — T+1 on the underlying, restrictions on short-selling — that simply do not exist in the textbooks. Meeting those constraints profitably is an engineering problem as much as a pricing problem. So alongside trading, I have spent those same years building the systems that do it: real-time fitted volatility curves, automated hedging of delta, vega, skew and kurtosis risk, execution algorithms that accumulate volatility positions quietly, portfolio margin optimization, and P&L attribution that decomposes the day’s result into the dimensions that actually produced it.
Part of the job has always been training new traders. Watching people go from first spreadsheet to running their own books within a year taught me how much of options trading is craft — learnable, structured, and much older than any particular software — and how much of it can be written down. This site is the attempt to write it down.
The articles run in three series:
- Strategy — pricing, fitting volatility curves and surfaces, detecting mispricing, hedging.
- Execution — how listed options actually trade: products, contract rules, market microstructure, and compliance.
- Tech — reference architectures for market data pipelines, backtesting, and monitoring.
A note on what you will not find here: live positions, client information, proprietary parameters, or anything drawn from non-public data. Everything on this site is textbook-level knowledge, public data, and reproducible methods — stated openly, so you can check the work yourself.
— Ezra, 3Y3C Option Lab