James Thomas asked:


I make a living out of trading options…and a pretty good one at that!

For a long time I couldn’t say those words as I struggled just to hold on to my capital, let alone make it grow.

Though there were several reasons why I struggled (including being grossly undercapitalized and at the same time placing too much of my trading bank on individual trades) the main reason for my struggle I believe was a lack of focus.

By ‘lack of focus’ I mean that I was constantly jumping around trying to implement too many different option trading strategies from basic call and put buying, to putting on multi leg spread tades, believing that the more complex the strategy, the greater my chance of success.

I had become a ‘Jack Of All Trades & A Master Of None’ and the only people that were making money from my option trading were my brokers.

One day a friend of mine (a very successful futures trader) said to me, “You don’t need to know everything about trading the markets to make money and be a success. You just need to ‘focus’ and become an expert in one or at most a few different trading strategies and know exactly when and how to use them. The rest is just practice!”

Those words rang loudly in my ears and from that point onwards I narrowed my focus.

I decided that I would go back to the very basics of option trading and only buy calls and puts with the intention of becoming very good at picking the short-term direction of stocks.

Today, almost 2 years later and after going through a steep and often expensive learning curve, buying calls and/or puts is what brings in the largest portion of my current monthly income.

I also use a couple different spread trading strategies when the market moves sideways, but my main ‘focus’ is on picking the short-term direction of a small number of stocks that I have gotten to know VERY well (through backtesting), and then buying the appropriate option based on risk vs reward and my short-term outlook.

The success I’m enjoying today (19 profitable months out of the last 24) is due to becoming proficient at reading stock charts and developing an option trading system that I am comfortable with and performs well and by applying my trading rules consistently.

Ultimately you only need to know a few different strategies to be able to trade any stock up, down, or sideways.

The options themselves are simply the ‘tools’ to make money from your ‘opinions’ and in my experience the tools that are the easiest to use, have also been the most profitable.



Jeffrey

Dan Beatty asked:


A credit spread is a type of vertical spread. It is a trading strategy in which you are buying an option, call or put, at a certain strike price, and simultaneously selling the same type of option at a different strike price of the same month. The sold strike price must have a higher value thus creating a credit at the time the trade is placed. As time goes on the options premium will depreciate, and as long as the price of the stock does not go past the sold strike price at the end of expiration, you keep the full credit. There are two main ways to trade credit spreads - either a low capital risk trade or a high probability trade.

The low capital risk trade consists of making a trade using in the money (ITM) options or at the money (ATM) options to compose the credit spread. For example a stock trading at $55. You are bearish on this stock feeling that it will fall below $50 and stay there. You create a credit spread using calls called a Bear Call Spread. You would sell an ITM $50 call for $5.75 and then buy an ATM $55 call for $2.00 creating a credit for $3.75. The max value of the spread, the difference between strikes, is $5 (55-50), which makes your max risk is $1.25 (5-3.75). This is the low capital risk your are making $3.75 while risking $1.25 which makes for a 300% rate of return. So a high rate of return a low capital risk, what could be wrong with this trade? The probability of success. The stock needs to be below $50 and stay below $50 at the expiration of the options in order to be a successful trade. You need to be correct in your assessment of the direction of the trade.

The high probability trade consists of making a trade using out of the money (OTM) options to compose the credit. Using the same example of a stock trading at $55 that you are bearish, feeling it will fall and stay below $50, we create a different type of credit spread. To create the credit spread, you would sell an OTM $65 Call for $1.10 and buy an OTM $70 Call for $.50 creating a credit of $.60. The max value is still $5 which makes your risk $4.40, much higher than the previous example. This makes for a high capital risk making only $0.60 while risking $4.40 which makes for a 13% rate of return. The difference however is in the probability of the trade being successful. The stock will need to close below $60 at expiration of the options and since it already is below $60 and you feel the stock is weak and will be going lower. The probability of it gaining 10 points or 18% is unlikely in comparison to the previous low capital risk trade in which the stock is at 55 and has to fall 5 points and stay below $50 for the trade to be successful, which makes this credit spread a high probability of success.

Low capital risk but also a low probability of success for the beginner or a higher capital risk with a high probability of success makes for the two choices for the credit spread trader. The choice depends on the traders personality a more involved trader one that really likes to pay close attention to his trade and can make adjustments when necessary may prefer the low capital risk trade. The trader trading part time or is more conservative in their trades one that likes to place a trade and then just monitor it once daily would be more likely to choose the high probability trade. Which type of trader are you?



Joshua

Asoka Selvarajah asked:


Options Trading has a reputation for being extremely risky, but this reputation is in large part undeserved. True, option trades are extremely risky - even dangerous if you have no idea what you are doing. However, that is true of all forms of offline or online trading, and trading in options is no exception.

While options trading has this reputation among laymen, it is often considered to be a form of risk limitation with professional traders. After all, in what other form of investment can you guarantee the maximum loss you can suffer right at the point where you enter the trade?

Options are contracts that give the purchaser the right to buy or sell an underlying security, such as a stock, a bond or a commodity, at a fixed price and for a fixed time period only. You can find options on underlying securities such as stocks, mutual funds, bonds, commodities, and more.

Option trading gives you the chance to exploit a whole range of market opportunities that are unavailable with conventional online stock or forex trading. For example, one class of option trade allows you as the buyer to make money if you expect the market to move strongly in one direction or the other, but you are not sure in which. If you are the seller of position, by contrast, you are betting that the market either goes nowhere directionally and/or the volatility declines.

Trading in options can actually lower your risk. For example, whenever you buy an underlying stock, there is always the extremely small, but non-zero, risk that the company can go bust and the stock price can first be suspended and then go to zero. That means that your potential loss is the point difference between the price you entered the stock trade and zero, multiplied by the number of shares you own! If you had done the corresponding option trade by contrast, i.e. buying call options on the stock, your loss would be simply the price you paid for the options.

Where options are very risky is where untrained traders go “naked short”, as it is called. In one common example, they sell put options on a stock index future and collect the option premium as payment. This gives the buyer the right to sell the stock index future back to the put option seller at a fixed price, called the strike price. This is fine as long as the underlying index continues to rally and the strike price is basically never reached. However, in one famous example, one hapless option punter, who had been happily selling put options on the FTSE index futures for years and collecting the cash, got badly caught when the entire stock market crashed in 1987, and the option buyers exercised their right to sell their positions at prices much higher than the current market!

However, such foolishness apart, option trading can be an extremely profitable way to trade in stocks, forex, bonds, currencies or whatever. When used properly, they can actually limit your risk drastically. Option trading can allow you to create positions and exploit market opportunities not otherwise available. Best of all, if you combine options with the underlying instrument, you get to create a whole range of interesting risk profiles.

The key to success in option trading is, as with anything else in life, to study the subject hard before trying to trade and, if possible, begin by paper trading the market. Once you are satisfied that you know what you are doing and have a valid option trading methodology, then you can begin risking real money. Even then, you only trade very small to start with and with money that you can afford to lose. Once you know what you are doing, and your account size show some nice profits, then you can afford to trade progressively larger size for progressively larger profit.



Nathan