Why I Trade SPX, SPY, QQQ and IBIT Options: An Advantage Player on Liquidity and Fills

By Charlie Nguyen · Published Oct 25, 2026 · Data as of the Oct 23, 2026 close · 13 min read

I’m a professional casino advantage player, so I don’t like paying for anything I don’t have to. In trading, the cost most people ignore is the bid-ask spread. That’s why my options trading is built on four tickers: SPX, SPY, QQQ and IBIT. They have some of the most liquid options in the world, which means the tightest spreads and the best fills.

The spread is the house edge

In March 2018 I learned to count cards through Blackjack Apprenticeship. I started with a $7,000 bankroll and grew it to seven figures. What that taught me is simple: the edge is small, so every cost matters. A card counter’s advantage is often only a percent or two. Give a little of it away on every hand and you have no edge left.

I’ve traded options since 2010, and today it’s my full-time work. The bid-ask spread is the trading version of the house edge. If an option is quoted $0.50 bid and $0.60 ask, the fair price is about $0.55. Sell at the bid and you’ve given up five cents before the trade even starts. Buy it back at the ask later and you pay again.

Five cents doesn’t sound like much. But options are cheap compared with the stock, so five cents can be 10% of the premium, and you pay it on every trade, all year. Like a small house edge, it doesn’t hurt on one hand. It grinds you down over hundreds of them.

Why liquidity is my edge

An advantage player picks the right table before placing a bet. In options, picking the right table means picking a liquid underlying. Here is what liquidity gives me:

• Tight spreads. Less money lost getting in and out, so more of the premium stays mine.
• Fills near the mid. When thousands of traders and market makers are quoting a product, a limit order at the mid price usually fills, or fills within a tick or two.
• Deep open interest. Millions of open contracts mean there is almost always someone on the other side, even at the strike I want.
• Lots of strikes and expirations. SPX, SPY, QQQ and IBIT all list options expiring every weekday, plus weeklies, monthlies and longer-dated options, so I can pick the exact delta and days to expiration my plan calls for instead of settling for whatever exists.
• Easy exits. The day I need to get out is usually the day markets are moving fast. That’s when a thin market gets very expensive. In a deep market I can close at a fair price when I need to.
• Spreads without legging risk. Most of my trades are put credit spreads. I send both legs as one order and get filled at a fair net price, instead of filling one leg and chasing the other.

Each ticker has a job. SPX carries my S&P 500 put credit spreads, from about a week out to longer-dated ones. QQQ is where I trade very short-dated Nasdaq-100 options. IBIT is my bitcoin exposure, like the IBIT 15-delta put on this site. SPY is the S&P 500 in a smaller size.

The numbers: SPX, SPY, QQQ and IBIT vs the rest

Here is a snapshot of the option markets for SPX and nine ETFs at the Oct 23, 2026 close, from Cboe’s delayed option quotes. The “near-the-money spread” is the median bid-ask spread of the four strikes closest to the price, calls and puts, for the standard monthly expiration (Nov 20, 2026, 28 days out). Because SPX is about ten times the price of SPY, the “per $10,000 of underlying” column puts every ticker on the same footing. The last column is the put closest to 15 delta about six weeks out.

Source: Cboe delayed option quotes (cdn.cboe.com; SPX from the _SPX quote, which includes both SPX and SPXW options), downloaded Oct 25, 2026 for the Oct 23, 2026 close (SPX closed at 7,623.68). Volume is the day’s contracts as reported in that feed and may not include every exchange for multi-listed ETF options (SPX options trade only on Cboe); use it to compare tickers, not as an official total. Spreads are quotes at the close, which can be a little wider than during the day. Open interest is contracts open across all strikes and expirations. Per $10,000 of underlying = spread ÷ underlying price × 10,000.

What jumps out:

• SPX has the most open interest of all: 22.8 million contracts, each about 10 times the size of a SPY contract. Its near-the-money spread of $1.20 looks big, but it is 0.9% of the option price and $1.57 per $10,000 of the index, tighter than SPY’s $1.84.
• SPY and QQQ lead the ETFs. 17.0 million and 12.4 million open contracts, and near-the-money spreads around 1.1% and 0.8% of the option price. IWM is close behind. If you trade small caps it’s a fine choice too; my focus is the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100 and bitcoin.
• DIA tracks a big index but trades far less. Its near-the-money spread was 4.1% of the price, and its 15-delta put was 10.5% wide, versus 2.2% for SPY.
• Among crypto ETFs, IBIT is the only deep market. Its 15-delta put was 0.52 bid, 0.53 ask: a one-cent spread. FBTC holds the same bitcoin, but its comparable put was quoted 0.10 / 1.95. FBTC had 84,529 open contracts against IBIT’s 6,808,014. BITB and ARKB were thinner still. For ether, ETHA’s 15-delta put was 16.6% wide.

Same asset, very different cost to trade. The fund you hold for the long run and the fund you trade options on don’t have to be the same. Comparing bitcoin ETFs to hold? See the crypto ETF list and the fee comparison.

Why I also trade SPX

SPY and SPX follow the same index, so why use both? Because for the bigger S&P 500 trades I make, SPX fits better. Comparing them fairly means dividing SPX by its size: one SPX contract is about 10.03 SPY contracts.

Same Cboe snapshot, Oct 23, 2026 close. SPX spread ÷ 10.03 = the cost of the same exposure in SPY-sized pieces.

Per dollar of exposure, SPX was as tight as SPY or tighter on every line. Beyond cost, here is why it works for me:

• Cash settlement. SPX options settle in cash. There are no shares to buy or deliver, so a short put that finishes in the money never turns into a large stock position over a weekend.
• European style, no early assignment. SPX options can only be exercised at expiration. With SPY, a short option that goes deep in the money can be assigned early, which can break a spread apart at a bad time.
• Daily expirations, settled at the close. SPXW options expire every weekday and settle on the closing value, which lets me place spreads at exactly the days to expiration I want. (The standard monthly SPX options settle on the opening print, so I check which one I’m trading.)
• Size efficiency for spreads. One 25-point-wide SPX put spread is roughly the same position as ten SPY put spreads a tenth as wide. That’s one order with two legs instead of twenty contracts, with fewer commissions to pay. SPX does carry higher per-contract exchange fees, so I compare the total cost.
• Tax treatment. In the US, SPX options are generally Section 1256 contracts: gains and losses are treated as 60% long-term and 40% short-term no matter how long you held them, and open positions are marked to market at year end. SPY options are taxed like other equity options. This is general information, not tax advice; your situation may be different, so ask a tax professional.

When SPY is better: for small accounts and small positions. A single SPX spread can risk several thousand dollars; SPY lets you trade the same idea at one tenth of the size, and size is the first risk control. If one contract of SPX is too big for your account, SPY is the right tool.

What slippage costs in a year (example)

Here’s a simple example, using the 15-delta puts from the table. It is an illustration, not a prediction.

These puts don’t cost exactly the same, and real fills are often better than the bid or ask, so don’t read the dollar figures as exact. The point is the scale. On a liquid underlying the spread is a rounding error. On a thin one it can be bigger than your edge.

My checklist for good fills

1. Trade liquid underlyings. SPX, SPY, QQQ, IBIT. If the market is thin, the trade has to be much better to be worth it.
2. Always use limit orders, starting at the mid. No market orders on options. If it doesn’t fill, move a tick or two at a time. SPX ticks are bigger in dollars, so step carefully.
3. Check the spread as a percent of the mid, and compare different-sized products per dollar of the underlying, not in raw cents. My rule for the puts I sell: pass if the spread is wider than about 5% of the mid price.
4. Look at open interest and volume at your strike, not just for the ticker. Popular round-number strikes and standard expirations are usually the tightest.
5. Avoid the first and last few minutes of the session. Spreads are usually widest right after the open and can widen near the close.
6. Be careful around big news. Spreads often widen around Fed decisions, CPI reports and big crypto moves. If you don’t need to trade then, wait.
7. Enter spreads as one order. Send the whole put spread as a single combo order, so you never get stuck with only one leg filled.
8. Know your settlement. SPXW settles at the close, monthly SPX at the open, and SPY, QQQ and IBIT can be assigned early and deliver shares. Plan the exit before the entry.
9. Size so you never need to exit at any price. This is the advantage-play rule: no single loss should be able to knock you out. When you’re sized right, you can wait for a fair fill. If SPX is too big for that, use SPY.

Today’s volatility for these four

Option prices, and how much premium you collect for the same risk, depend on implied volatility. Here is each ticker’s 1-year IV Rank. SPX and SPY both use the VIX, which Cboe calculates from SPX option prices:

See how volatility feeds into the odds of a trade on POP vs POT vs P50, and today’s worked ideas with real strikes on options trade ideas.

The risks

The other half of my approach is patience with cash. I keep a separate pile of dry powder for big drops; that plan is in the Buy the Dip app for SPY, QQQ and IBIT.

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