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The script below will check if a stock ticker you entered allow you to trade in Options. It will parses through Yahoo Finance website to look for those information.

You can also modify the script to suit to your own needs.

Options trader might be interested to find out if the stock quotes in their portfolio are optionable. There are many website on the internet you can look for such information. For example, you can go to the Yahoo Finance or MoneyCentral portal, key in the stock quote and click on the Options link. It is Optionable if options data is displayed else it is not. Below is how you do it by using excel.

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Assuming that you have a list of stock symbols in the Column A in a excel spreadsheet and you need to find out how many of them are optionable and how many of them are not.

We are going to use Yahoo Finance in our example here. If you go to Yahoo Finance, key in any stock symbol and click on the "Options" link, the option chains data will be displayed as follow:

But if you see the following screen display, mean the stock quote you entered did not provide Options to trade.

By looking at the screenshot above, whenever a stock symbol did not provide any options data, the message display on the screen will be “There is no data available for xxx”. In that case, we just need to create a script that loop through the number of stock symbols you have provided to look for the message above.

The conditions are Optionable – cannot found the message above, Non Optionable – found the message above.Below are the script:

Set opIE = New SHDocVw.InternetExplorer
c = "http://finance.yahoo.com/q/op?s=" & 'record in column A' & ""
opIE.Navigate c

sPage = opIE.Document.body.InnerHTML
Optionable = InStr(1, sPage, "There is no data available")If Optionable = "" then
'Perform your own subroutine ***
End If

*** You can add in your own subroutine to perform your own task here.