In February, 2010, brokerages and market data services in the US have started transitioning their options symbols to use explicit data elements.  For reference, the old options symbol consisted of an option root, followed by a letter code for the expiration month which also combined the code for puts and calls, and followed by a letter code for the strike price.  The new options symbology, proposed by the Options Clearing Corporation, is [option root][2-digit expiration year][expiration month][expiration day][C/P][strike price * 1000, padded with zeroes to 8 digits].  (During the initial transition period, the option roots remain the same as with the old option ticker format, but will transition to use the underlying ticker symbol instead.)

While the new option ticker symbology is much easier to read and write than the old one, it is still more machine-friendly than human-friendly.  Also, it appears that although brokerages and data services have to use the new symbology to communicate with the exchanges, internally they can present any symbology they see fit to their customers.  This gave rise to many different implementations of the new options symbology, which causes problems for a program such as Personal Stock Monitor that has to communicate with different data services.

Because we didn't want to force our customers to use the data service internal formats (and in one case, this was explicitly disallowed)  we created a ticker symbol format for options that made it easy to read, and write the format for our customers, as well as making it easy to translate the format to any of the internal ticker symbol formats supported by the brokerages and data services.  Our format is as follows:

 [option root] [3-letter expiration month] [expiration day] [expiration year] [Put/Call] [strike]

So for example, an OCC symbol that is MSQ100220P00030000 would be written as MSQ Feb 20 2010 Put 30 in PSM.  Also, we decided that the expiration day should be optional.  If the day is not specified, PSM will calculate it using the "Saturday after the third Friday of the month" rule.  This works for the majority of equity options, but for index options and some others, you have to specify the day explicitly since it may not follow this rule.  If you specify the incorrect expiration day, the brokerage or data service will not be able to retrieve the option price, and it will show a question mark next to it.

This new option ticker format is now supported in all parts of PSM, including trading and option chains.