Welcome to the wonderful world of equity options. You may have heard that option trading is high risk, and indeed it is, for much the same reasons that spread betting is high risk. The instruments themselves are derivatives from the cash markets, and are highly geared, but options themselves were originally introduced to the US [...]
In today’s chaotic stock market, the ability to make a profit trading long Option positions (Puts and Calls) depends on being able to capitalize on short-term moves in the price of a stock or index. Stocks are up one day, and down the next – and it’s anybody’s guess as to what the long-term outlook [...]
Before we can begin to trade in options, we need to understand the basic terminology of these sophisticated financial instruments so that we can start to interpret the mass of figures which appear, when an option chain appears on the screen.
Each option has a so called strike price. This is the price at which the [...]