Invest and Trade Profitably with Jon Johnson

Would you explain what the last two letters are in the option chain symbol?

August 30, 2000

Option symbols have prefixes and suffixes. The prefix is the part of the option ticker symbol that identifies the stock that the option covers. Usually this is the same for all options on a stock, but stocks with many options (highly volatile, recent splits) may have more than one prefix. The last two letters represent the month and the strike price of the stock. For calls, ‘A’ stands for January and so on up to ‘L’ for December. Puts start off where calls end, with January being ‘M.’ and December being ‘L.’ There are different cycles for options as well. The strike price is more complicated as there are many more strikes.

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