What Is the Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA)?
Let me explain what the Options Price Reporting Authority, or OPRA, really is. It's a committee made up of representatives from various participating securities exchanges, and their main job is to provide last-sale options quotations and other information from those exchanges.
As a national market system plan, OPRA handles the process where participants exchange, consolidate, and disseminate market data. You'll find OPRA's two primary data feeds cover trades—which are last sale reports for completed securities transactions—and quotes, which include bids and offers for options.
Key Takeaways
Here's what you need to know right away about OPRA: it's responsible for aggregating and disseminating price quotations for listed options contracts in the U.S. OPRA provides data feeds to financial firms, brokers, and traders, showing the national best bid and offer for an options contract or series. And remember, options quotes come as tables of data called options chains.
Understanding OPRA
When I dive into OPRA, I see it divides its services into two main areas: a basic service for all options except foreign currency derivatives, and an 'FCO service' specifically for foreign currency options information. The organization includes exchanges like the Boston Options Exchange (BOX), Cboe Options Exchange, International Securities Exchange (ISE), Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), Miami International Securities Exchange, NYSE Arca, NYSE American, and Nasdaq BX Options.
OPRA takes quotes from each of these exchanges and combines them in its feeds to produce a national best bid and offer (NBBO) quote.
Less formally, think of OPRA as an industry-led consortium that supports the timely and accurate creation and release of market data, especially for more esoteric financial instruments like listed options and related securities. Behind the scenes, the work and data from OPRA add a lot to market liquidity and other elements that drive market efficiency. Without what OPRA provides, capital markets would be less developed, resulting in higher costs of capital for savers and borrowers.
Reading Options Quotes
Options have their own language, and when you start trading them, the information can seem overwhelming. When you look at an options quote, it might first appear as rows of unintelligible numbers, but these quotes—known as options chains—provide valuable information about the security today and where it might head in the future.
Important point: not all public stocks have options, but for those that do, the information is presented in real-time and in a consistent order.
Take an example of an options chain with quotes provided by OPRA, like this one from Apple, Inc. The left column shows the option ticker—these are all calls with various strike prices expiring in August 2019. Then you see last trade time, bid, ask, last price, and change, along with volume and the last price's implied volatility for that option. (Imagine here an image of a call option chain for AAPL, sourced from Yahoo! Finance, displaying columns for ticker, last trade, bid, ask, last, change, volume, and implied volatility.)
Other articles for you
This text lists financial and economic terms starting with the letter 'Q' from Investopedia's dictionary.
Volume analysis examines trading volume to predict price movements in securities.
EFTPS is a 24/7 service by the U.S
A limited government restricts governmental powers through laws to protect individual liberties and prevent power concentration.
Joint liability occurs when multiple parties share full responsibility for a debt or legal obligation, allowing creditors to hold any one accountable for the entire amount.
Optimized Portfolio as Listed Securities (OPALS) is a single-country equity index product created by Morgan Stanley in 1994 as a precursor to ETFs, designed to track and outperform benchmarks with fewer holdings.
A non-competitive tender allows smaller investors to buy US Treasury securities at the market price set by institutional buyers in auctions.
Blue sky laws are state-level regulations designed to protect investors from securities fraud by requiring registration and disclosure of offerings.
Receivership is a process where a neutral receiver manages a distressed company's assets to aid creditors and avoid bankruptcy, differing from bankruptcy which protects debtors.
A war exclusion clause in insurance policies denies coverage for damages caused by war or related events to protect insurers from financial ruin.