Discrepancy in bid/ask prices between "standard" and "non-standard" options

Community AMA
1

I’m looking to sell covered calls on AMD. I see under the Expiry field on TD Advanced Dashboard (Canadian version of ToS), there are expiries with the “(Non-standard)” tag. Searching up what this means, Schwab says non-standard options are (https://help.streetsmart.schwab.com/edge/1.6/Content/Non-Standard%20Expiring%20Options.htm):

Schwab currently has two broad categories of non-standard expiring options available for trading:

  • Weekly expiring options
  • Quarterly expiring options

Here comes the part I am confused:
Comparing a “standard” and “non-standard” option with the same expiry date, the “non-standard” option has a significantly higher bid/ask price. Why is that?

Non-standard:
image

Standard:
image

When I compare “standard” and “non-standard” options with a further out expiry, the bid/ask on the non-standard is still significantly higher than its standard counterpart.

Non-standard:
image

Standard:
image

2

Welcome to what happens to option chains after a stock split or merger. Remember that AMD and XLNX completed their merger back in Feb. Per the terms of the agreement, Xilinx shareholders receive 1.7234 shares of AMD common stock for each share of XLNX they hold. Since XLNX was trading separately I would expect all of the monthly/quarterly options to still exist at that ratio until they expire. That’s what the non-standard entries are, and why the bid ask spread is so much higher. I don’t have the specifics available right now to screenshot but the contracts should be something like 172/100 and dollar value.