Options for the Beginner and Beyond: Unlock the Opportunities and Minimize the Risks, Edition 2

W. Edward Olmstead

Dec 2012 · FT Press

About this ebook

Master option trading strategies one step at a time! Options for the Beginner and Beyond, Second Edition teaches options through brief, carefully-paced lessons on option concepts and trading strategies, crystal-clear definitions, and plenty of real trading examples. Every lesson builds on the one preceding it, explaining options in plain English, and guiding you all the way to advanced strategies covered in no other introductory tutorial. Drawing on his extensive experience teaching options trading to beginners -- and five years editing a leading options newsletter -- W. Edward Olmstead shows how to systematically control your risk, protect your investments, and maximize your profits. This new Second Edition integrates new coverage of weekly options throughout, and presents updated tax strategies every options trader needs to know. Olmstead shows you how to do all this, and much more:

• Select options with high profit potential
• Enter and exit trades
• Choose brokers
• Work with the Greeks, risk graphs, and LEAPs
• Use vertical, event producing, and calendar spreads
• Trade covered calls, straddles, strangles, married puts, and collars
• Master these and other sophisticated strategies: naked options, stock substitutes, backspreads, butteryfly spreads, iron condors, and double diagonals
• Implement effective end-of-year tax strategies
• Day trade indexes with options
• Use delta-neutral trading
• Leverage the theory of maximum pain; implied volatility, and Black-Scholes

Ratings and reviews

I am more or less a beginner with options, and this book was very very good at introducing and explaining strategies and making them all very simple to understand, along with all the pros and cons. I have tried many other resources, but most of them are pretty intimidating to a beginner. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to understand option strategies.

About the author

W. Edward Olmstead has a B.S. from Rice University and a Ph.D from Northwestern University, where he is currently Professor of Applied Mathematics in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He has received several prestigious awards for teaching excellence including an endowed chair. His teaching activities include courses that cover both the theory of options pricing and practical strategies for trading options.

In the world of finance, Dr. Olmstead has more than fifteen years of experience in the trading of options. He holds a FINRA Series 65 license along with considerable experience as an options consultant. He has written various articles on options for the online media.

Dr. Olmstead was Editor of The Options Professor newsletter published by Independent Investor, Inc. during 2003-07. His consulting activities included service as an options analyst for Spear Capital Management. He also worked on an ultra short-term trading concept for a member firm of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Since 2010, he has utilized a proprietary options strategy in the management of funds for a group of private clients.

For more information about Dr. Olmstead’s current options interests, go to www.olmsteadoptions.com.