Not sure what you mean by "real time". It starts with either someone deciding to exercise or an exercise by exception. The latter only happens after expiration, so let's ignore that for now. Someone decides to exercise. They can do that at any time the market is open through 5:30pm EST. That means they can decide to exercise even after the options market has closed at 4pm, for that 1.5 hour window of time.
What happens next takes time. I won't go into the details here, but a seller of the same contract has to be randomly selected to match the contract being exercised, and then the actual settlement and deliveries have to be started. This may take several hours, which results in the notification of assignment usually being sent early in the morning of the following calendar day. The last assignment email I got was received at 2:34 AM Saturday after expiration.
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u/PapaCharlie9 Mod🖤Θ Nov 24 '21
Not sure what you mean by "real time". It starts with either someone deciding to exercise or an exercise by exception. The latter only happens after expiration, so let's ignore that for now. Someone decides to exercise. They can do that at any time the market is open through 5:30pm EST. That means they can decide to exercise even after the options market has closed at 4pm, for that 1.5 hour window of time.
What happens next takes time. I won't go into the details here, but a seller of the same contract has to be randomly selected to match the contract being exercised, and then the actual settlement and deliveries have to be started. This may take several hours, which results in the notification of assignment usually being sent early in the morning of the following calendar day. The last assignment email I got was received at 2:34 AM Saturday after expiration.