Tom Sosnoff mentioned that new symbology to replace OPRA codes are mandated for use in the coming month. I did a little research and found some discussion of the "
Options Symbology Initiative" at the OCC. Apparently they started working on this five years ago and unsurprisingly it has taken at least a year longer than planned.
The new symbols will be much longer but the verbosity is also intuitively informative.
They are formed from concatenation of the following:
Root symbol + Expiration Year(yy)+ Expiration Month(mm)+ Expiration Day(dd) + Call/Put Indicator (C or P) + Strike price
It looks like the overall symbols can be different lengths if the root symbols are the underlying ticker symbol (which can anywhere from 1 to 4 or more characters) and the strike price will not include leading zeros.
I wonder if that will be a problem for displays on screen? Tom says it will not affect the TOS platform at all.
-aw