Online service that computes implied volatility
"My broker (thinkorswim) offers this from the platform's trade tab.  I believe this feature isn't crippled in the PaperMoney version which is effectively a ""free online service.""" remember that IV is literally the volatility that would be present to equate to the latest price of a particular option contract, assuming the Black-Scholes-Merton model. Yahoo's free finance service lists the IV for all the options that it tracks.
Ok so I used Excel solver for this but it's on the right track.  Latest price = $77.19  Latest div = $1.50  3-yr div growth = 28%  g = ???  rs = 14%  So we'll grow out the dividend 3 years @ 28%, and then capitalize them into perpetuity using a cap rate of [rs - g], and take the NPV using the rs of 14%. We can set it up and then solve g assuming an NPV of the current share price of $77.19.  So it should be:  NPV = $77.19 =   [$1.50 / (1+0.14)^0 ] +  [$1.50 x (1+0.28)^1 / (1+0.14)^1 ] +  ... +  [$1.50 x (1+0.28)^3 / (1+0.14)^3 ] +  [$1.50 x (1+0.28)^3 x (1+g) / (0.14-g) / (1+0.14)^4 ]  Which gives an implied g of a little under 9%. Let me know if this makes sense, and definitely check the work... I traded futures for a brief period in school using the BrokersXpress platform (now part of OptionsXpress, which is in turn now part of Charles Schwab). They had a virtual trading platform, and apparently still do, and it was excellent. Since my main account was enabled for futures, this carried over to the virtual account, so I could trade a whole range of futures, options, stocks, etc. I spoke with OptionsXpress, and you don't need to fund your acount to use the virtual trading platform. However, they will cancel your account after an arbitrary period of time if you don't log in every few days. According to their customer service, there is no inactivity fee on your main account if you don't fund it and make no trades. I also used Stock-Trak for a class and despite finding the occasional bug or website performance issue, it provided a good experience. I received a discount because I used it through an educational institution, and customer service was quite good (probably for the same reason), but I don't know if those same benefits would apply to an individual signing up for it.  I signed up for top10traders about seven years ago when I was in secondary school, and it's completely free. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for, and the interface was poorly designed and slow. Furthermore, at that time, there were no restrictions that limited the number of shares you could buy to the number of outstanding shares, so you could buy as many as you could afford, even if you exceeded the number that physically existed. While this isn't an issue for large companies, it meant you could earn a killing trading highly illiquid pink sheet stocks because you could purchase billions of shares of companies with only a few thousand shares actually outstanding. I don't know if these issues have been corrected or not, but at the time, I and several other users took advantage of these oversights to rack up hundreds of trillions of dollars in a matter of days, so if you want a realistic simulation, this isn't it.  Investopedia also has a stock simulator that I've heard positive things about, although I haven't used it personally. "Note that the series you are showing is the historical spot index (what you would pay to be long the index today), not the history of the futures quotes. It's like looking at the current price of a stock or commodity (like oil) versus the futures price.  The prompt futures quote will be different that the spot quote. If you graphed the history of the prompt future you might notice the discontinuity more. How do you determine when to roll from one contract to the other? Many data providers will give you a time series for the ""prompt"" contract history, which will automatically roll to the next expiring contract for you.  Some even provide 2nd prompt, etc. time series.  If that is not available, you'd have to query multiple futures contracts and interleave them based on the expiry rules, which should be publicly available. Also is there not a price difference from the contract which is expiring and the one that is being rolled forward to? Yes, since the time to delivery is extended by ~30 days when you roll to the next contract. but yet there are no sudden price discontinuities in the charts. Well, there are, but it could be indistinguishable from the normal volatility of the time series." This is from Google Finance right now. "Their algorithm may be different (and proprietary), but how I would to it is to assume that daily changes in the stock are distributed normally (meaning the probability distribution is a ""bell curve"" - the green area in your chart).  I would then calculate the average and standard deviation (volatility) of historical returns to determine the center and width of the bell curve (calibrating it to expected returns and implied volaility based on option prices), then use standard formulas for lognormal distributions to calculate the probability of the price exceeding the strike price. So there are many assumptions involved, and in the end it's just a probability, so there's no way to know if it's right or wrong - either the stock will cross the strike or it won't." you could try [FRED](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=HO7), or maybe try the CME and ICE's websites for some decent data.. haven't looked just suggestions - pretty sure the symbol for the Libor futures is EM, you could approximate from that so long as it's not a doctoral thesis Edgar Online is the SEC's reporting repository where public companies post their forms, these forms contain financial data Stock screeners allow you to compare many companies based on many financial metrics. Many sites have them, Google Finance has one with a decent amount of utility "To expand on keshlam's answer: A direct feed does not involve a website of any kind.  Each exchange publishes its order/trade feed(s) onto a packet network where subscribers have machines listening and reacting. Let's call the moment when a trade occurs inside an exchange's matching engine ""T0"".  An exchange then publishes the specifics of that trade as above, and the moment when that information is first available to subscribers is T1.  In some cases, T1 - T0 is a few microseconds; in other (notorious) cases, it can be as much as 100 milliseconds (100,000x longer). Because it's expensive for a subscriber to run a machine on each exchange's network -- and also because it requires a team of engineers devoted to understanding each exchange's individual publication protocols -- it seems unlikely that Google pays for direct access.  Instead Google most likely pays another company who is a subscriber on each exchange around the world (let's say Reuters) to forward their incoming information to Google.  Reuters then charges Google and other customers according to how fast the customer wants the forwarded information.  Reuters has to parse the info it gets at T1, check it for errors, and translate it into a format that Google (and other customers) can understand.  Let's say they finish all that work and put their new packets on the internet at time T2. Then the slow crawl across the internet begins.  Some 5-100 milliseconds later your website of choice gets its pre-processed data at time T3.  Even though it's preprocessed, your favorite website has to unpack the data, store it in some sort of database, and push it onto their website at time T4. A sophisticated website might then force a refresh of your browser at time T4 to show you the new information.  But this forced refresh involves yet another slow crawl across the internet from where your website is based to your home computer, competing with your neighbor's 24/7 Netflix stream, etc.  Then your browser (with its 83 plugins and banner ads everywhere) has to refresh, and you finally see the update at T5. So, a thousand factors come into play, but even assuming that Google is doing the most expensive and labor-intensive thing it can and that all the networks between you and Google and the exchange are as short as they can be, you're not going to hear about a trade -- even a massive, market-moving trade -- for anywhere from 500 milliseconds to 5 seconds after T0.  And in a more realistic world that time will be 10-30 seconds. This is what Google calls ""Realtime"" on that disclaimer page, because they feel they're getting that info to you as fast as they possibly can (for free). Meanwhile, the computers that actually subscribe to an exchange heard about the trade way back at time T1 and acted on that information in a few microseconds.  That's almost certainly before T2 and definitely way way before T3.  The market for a particular instrument could change direction 5 times before Google even shows the first trade. So if you want true realtime access, you must subscribe to the exchange feed or, as keshlam suggests, sign up with a broker that provides its own optimized market feeds to you. (Note: This is not an endorsement of trading through brokers.)" I find this site to be really poor for the virtual play portion, especially the options league.  After you place a trade, you can't tell what you actually traded.  The columns for Exp and type are blank.  I have had better luck with OptionsXpress virtual trader.  Although they have recently changed their criteria for a non funded accounts and will only keep them active for 90 days.  I know the cboe has a paper trading platform but I haven't tried it out yet. "You could use any of various financial APIs (e.g., Yahoo finance) to get prices of some reference stock and bond index funds.  That would be a reasonable approximation to market performance over a given time span. As for inflation data, just googling ""monthly inflation data"" gave me two pages with numbers that seem to agree and go back to 1914.  If you want to double-check their numbers you could go to the source at the BLS. As for whether any existing analysis exists, I'm not sure exactly what you mean.  I don't think you need to do much analysis to show that stock returns are different over different time periods." My level of analysis is not quite that advanced. Can you share what that would show and why that particular measure is the one to use?  I've run regression on prices between the two. VIX prices have no correlation to the s&amp;p500 prices. Shouldn't true volatility result in the prices (more people putting options on the VIX during the bad times and driving that price up) correlate to the selloff that occurs within the S&amp;P500 during recessions and other events that would cause significant or minor volatility? My r2 showed no significance within a measurement of regression within Excel.  But, *gasp* I could be wrong, but would love to learn more about better ways of measurement :) Moody's is now Mergent Online. It's no longer being printed, and must be accessed digitally. In order to browse the database, check with your local public library or university to see if you can get access. (A University will probably require you to visit for access).  Another good tool is Value Line Reports. They are printed information sheets on public companies that are updated regularly, and are convenient for browsing and for comparing securities. Again, check your local libraries.  A lot of the public information you may be looking for can be found on Yahoo Finance, for free, from home. Yahoo finance, will give financial information, ratios, news, filings, analysis, all in one place. In my experience thanks to algorithmic trading the variation of the spread and the range of trading straight after a major data release will be as random as possible, since we live in an age that if some pattern existed at these times HFT firms would take out any opportunity within nanoseconds. Remember that some firms write algorithms to predict other algorithms, and it is at times like those that this strategy would be most effective. With regards to my own trading experience I have seen orders fill almost €400 per contract outside of the quoted range, but this is only in the most volatile market conditions. Generally speaking, event investing around numbers like these are only for top wall street firms that can use co-location servers and get a ping time to the exchange of less than 5ms. Also, after a data release the market can surge/plummet in either direction, only to recover almost instantly and take out any stops that were in its path. So generally, I would say that slippage is extremely unpredictable in these cases( because it is an advantage to HFT firms to make it so ) and stop-loss orders will only provide limited protection. There is stop-limit orders( which allow you to specify a price limit that is acceptable ) on some markets and as far as I know InteractiveBrokers provide a guaranteed stop-loss fill( For a price of course ) that could be worth looking at, personally I dont use IB.  I hope this answer provides some helpful information, and generally speaking, super-short term investing is for algorithms. In short, yes. Implied volatility will capture any expected upcoming material announcements. There is also supply/demand impact bundled in which may inflate an option price, and by extension increase implied volatility. OTM and ITM options are particularly predisposed to this phenomenon -- which is of course at odds with the traditional BS model assumptions -- the result is referred to as the volatility smile. Implied volatility is quoted as an annualised measure but isn't necessarily an annual value -- it will correspond to the option time period. "I listened to about 15 minutes of the video, but then I read your other link, which gives a much better summary. This guy is an idiot. Just consider this statement: ""If everyone was taxed at 100%, it wouldn't be enough to balance the federal budget."" This is true to some extent. It wouldn't be enough to balance the federal budget in one year. Experts often cite things like debt to GDP to show that a country's debt is ballooning, but they don't mention this obvious fact: We don't have to pay off our debts in a single year. Nobody does. Debt to GDP is a ratio and not the end all be all. Reinhart & Rogoff wrote a paper about how countries with high debt to GDP tend to have slower economic growth, but they don't mention that this occurs at every stage of debt growth. See Debt & Delusion by Dr. Robert Shiller for a great article on this subject. The daily kos article goes over most of the points I would make, but let me generalize a little: Always be wary of doomsday-predictors and free advice. This guy talks about correctly calling Fannie and Freddie. Even if he's right, why is he mentioning it? If he's such a good accountant and financial expert, surely he could've seen the tech bubble before the housing bubble right? It took a lot of analysis to figure out that CDO's were junk - anybody with the ability to read a balance sheet could see that many tech companies were overvalued. Every now and then, you get one hit wonders. They might never be right again, but they have the ""credentials."" If these people were really that good, they wouldn't be selling investment newsletters. They'd be applying their strategies and getting rich. Buffett has been getting rich for over 50 years, and he's not publishing newsletters with ""secret, genius"" strategies. He's made it pretty clear what his philosophy is, and anyone who follows it patiently will make money. Stransberry's argument only makes sense if you agree with the assumptions. The US will implode if nobody accepts our money. Nobody will accept our money if we're no longer the reserve currency or hyperinflation occurs or something like that. People have been predicting doom after every bubble, but that doesn't make it true. Some of his points (like the fact that we have too much debt) are valid, and I predict that the world will go into a period of deleveraging now. Nonetheless, the whole ""we will implode"" story is a scary picture, but it's just that - a picture."