We’re currently in the transitional phase of OSI, which kicked in late last month. When entering an options order, it’s prefix is the root symbol, followed by a descriptive tail (called a series key) of the expiration date, strike price, and whether it is a call or a put.

This transition is designed for people to get used to the new formatting, without moving away from the root symbols that option traders are already familiar with (an argument I don’t quite agree with, I think ultimately we’re more familiar with the underlying stock symbol). Starting in March, the new OSI will kick in, featuring the underlying symbol followed by the series key.

How has this transition affected your options trading? Chime in.

Who creates the rules on the internet? Microsoft? Mozilla? Google? The answer is W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization with 333 members with a mission to create the standards of the internet as we know it today. Members include the usual household names of the internet, Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

For our latest website, we’re obviously going to adhere to the latest in W3C standards. By following these guidelines, you are almost assured to have websites that look, and function uniformly across all browsers.

Except for Microsoft Browsers. Which just happen to be the dominant browser out there.

Of the browser from Microsoft, IE6 is notoriously difficult to deal with. PNG transparency, not there. There are often times when you think you have made the perfect design, only to find that the page looks completely different in IE6. To make matters worse, when you finally fix things for IE6, sometimes IE7 or IE8 would break, for no apparent reason.

That’s why Google has announced that it will stop supporting IE6 at the end of this month for their feature rich web applications, such as Google Documents. I do believe that with this change, the products from Google will come faster and run more stable than now.

What does this mean for us? Firstrade encounters the same issues as Google when we are design webpages, so we’re definitely hoping Google’s actions will lead IE6 users to upgrade to newer browsers. In the meantime, rest assured that our site will continue to support IE6 and all the other popular browsers out there.

Back in November we first touched upon OSI, the initiative by the Options Clearing Corporation to make option symbols simpler. Instead of the cryptic 5 symbol system used today, which includes the “root symbol” (eg. GOP for Google), plus two more characters to describe the expiration date and strike price. The new symbology is very descriptive, using over 20 characters to communicate exactly what the option represents.

For example, only the most experienced options investor can see APVGK and immediately know that this is an Apple July 2010 $155 call. In the new format, it’ll be displayed “AAPL July 2010 $155 Call”, and entered through a series of drop-down fields. One glance and you immediately know what the option represents.

Of course, you can still select the option through option chains, which function just as before, except without the 5 character symbols.

The changes will take place in two phases. In phase 1, the “root symbol” will remain unchanged: APV for Apple, GOP for Google, etc, followed by the “July 2010 $155 Call” information. This is so the investors can get used to the new date and strike price format. In phase 2, the “root symbol” will go away and be replaced by the “underlying symbol”, which is the stock/ETF symbol we are familiar with today.

Phase 1 will take place this coming weekend, Jan 22nd. Phase 2 will happen in stages, based on the first letter of the underlying symbol. For more information on Firstrade and OSI, please click here.

Built on the back-end of FirstradeNEXT, we are happy to introduce Firstrade Mobile, a mobile optimized platform for those who trade on-the-go! Simply access m.firstrade.com from your internet enabled device, including cell phones, PDAs or even some hand held game consoles, and get full access to news, quotes and your account.

Firstrade Mobile is available free to all Firstrade customers. Try it out, and feel free to leave us feedback or comments here on the blog.

As I was introducing the mobile platform to some of our coworkers last week, I really was blown away by the iPhone. Not the technology, but how Apple has managed to make people adopt a data plan.

First I asked for a show of hands to see who has a data plan, a few hands came up. Then I asked who has an iPhone, some hands came up.

Then I asked, who has a data plan, but no iPhone? Silence.

I remember back in the early 2000s, T-Mobile tried so hard to sell me a data plan. However it simply was not justifiable. “You can check your local weather” wasn’t too exciting. How things have changed.

Time for me to find a few phones to test out our system.

Most of your frequent readers know that we’re in the middle of development for FirstradeNEXT, and the mobile offering that will come with it. If you peek a little bit further down our roadmap, and in fact the roadmap of everyone in the financial industry, there’s a little change called OSI that is looming in February.

Okay, it’s not really little. In fact this is going to change how investors deal with options trading on a daily basis. Currently, options symbols are somewhat cryptic, one cannot know the strike price and expiration date just by looking at symbols. With the new setup, all the options will be descriptive, VERY descriptive. Option symbols are going from the current 3-5 character setup to 21 charaters!

We’ll provide more details regarding OSI and how Firstrade plans to adapt to the new standard. In the meantime, please take a look at details of this change by visiting http://www.optionsclearing.com/initiatives/symbology/

In the past few weeks, we’ve gotten quite a few requests for iPhone Applications on our forums, blogs, and Facebook group. Looking around, it seems that iPhones are everywhere, every block, every other person.

Back when the iPhone was released, now over 2 years ago, those with iPhones were part of the unique, or shall I say “cool” crowd. The same could be said 5 years ago in US colleges, when those who owned laptops with the glowing Apple logo really stood out. Nowadays, in some colleges, those without a Macbook are actually the minority.

Today, over half of the IT team at Firstrade has iPhones of various incarnation. I still remember launch day 2007 when everyone looked in awe and envy when a college camped out successfully and brought it in.

My goal today, however, is not to praise the iPhone. Instead I want to talk about what the iPhone did for the mobile space. By making data-driven services easy and accessible to the everyday folks, cellular phones have moved beyond calls and texting. Cell phones today are expected to check email, get maps, find reviews, etc. Believe it or not the technology has been around for over 10 years, but Apple made it easy, just as it did the personal computer back in the 80s.

This brings us to our new mobile trading platform. While the Apple smart phone is the dominant smart phone in the US today, in many other countries Microsoft and Nokia’s Symbian-based devices still have a large group of loyal users. At Firstrade, we want to make sure that every smart phone platform, and every data-capable cell phone can enjoy the benefits of trading online, with a fast and intuitive interface. In the next few weeks we’ll be releasing the Firstrade Mobility website, and I think everyone’ll be quite happy with it.

Next step, apps. That’s another post for another day.

I was reading WebWorkerDaily on how to make commutes more productive, and while I don’t fully agree with the writer on jam-packing your commute time with work prep, I realized how much the “morning commute” has changed since the arrival of smart phones.

For decades, the morning commute was a time to read the newspaper and get a head start on knowing what’s going on in the world. Nowadays, all the information dispatched to your mobile phone is personalized, customized content. With it, you can get a head-start on not just the day’s current events, but also your own tasks and duties.

That got me thinking. What more can we achieve during the morning drive outside of email, twitter and facebook? As Firstrade continues to improve its personalized site and services, how we position future mobile applications so that it improves the user’s productivity will be very important.

If you drive, please stick to the radio.

To all of my loyal newsletter readers, I just noticed yesterday that because of the intense development of FirstradeNEXT (which is a codename, btw), I completely forgot to send out the September issue of the newsletter.

To make it up to you guys, the October newsletter will be packed with more exciting tidbits about the upcoming beta. We are closely monitoring the blogs, Twitter and Facebook for your feedback, and you will not be disappointed when we launch this

Remember the days of Internet Explorer 5 vs Netscape? What about the days when you actually had to buy browsers at your local computer store? (if you don’t use AOL like everyone else). Browser compatibility wasn’t really a big deal back in the day, websites for the most part displayed text and graphics with little dynamic interaction.

Nowadays, browsers are packed with technology: Javascript, CSS, Jquery, Ajax, Flash support, etc just to name a few. These are no longer used simply to display static information, but also to take input dynamically, and are packed with animations. While there is a global standard W3C on how browsers should be designed, big names (ahem…. Microsoft) frequently deviate from the “standard”. The result is that websites frequently look different on various browsers, and (gasp!) sometimes function differently on different browsers.

As much as I hope everyone in the world uses a standard browser, the reality is that most people use IE, some use Firefox. A chunk of development time is dedicated to testing browser compatibility. As we pack in more dynamic tools and features into FirstradeNEXT, making it work on IE6 has become difficult. Watching how the tech guys at Firstrade get it to work on IE6 is like magic.

Facebook simply gives the user an error warning if it detects IE6, we don’t have that luxury. As we prepare to launch FirstradeNEXT, if you’re an Internet Explorer 6 user, I urge you to update to IE8 or Firefox for better online security. If you really want to stick with IE6, we’ll make it work .