I'm also looking for some trustworthy training sources that won't take all my capital to pay for! Anyone had any experience with Spread Trade options training? I rely on IBD for my basic info, and liked "Way of the Turtle" for more general trading perspective, plus Toni Turner's book "Short-term TRading in the New Stock Market." I'm presently slogging my way through "Options Made Easy" ((ha!)--which is really pretty clearly written and user-friendly.
If you are buying call options it is very important to know the period when the most time wastage occurs. That is the period where the writers make money out of the buyers. This can be such a fierce drop that it is probable that the unwary may well only break even when the actual share price is taking off and, if the price does not move, the option price will fall to the level of the price itself, say from 60p right down to 2p!
The bait offered to new traders is "You always know the maximum that you can lose".
The problem is that calls bought without due planning will almost always lose. Knowing in advance how much it will be is no help!
You take care with options, I've had my ups and downs with them and finally left for the straight futures markets.
Another personal opinion, if I may. Decide what is going to happen to a share price, select the option carefully (with plenty of time value on it and well into the future so that you can sell before the wastage starts to come in---you'll get to know when that is, with experience.) and buy it without going into all the straddles, butterflies, calender spreads, etc. Those strategies sound good because they limit your losses more. The problem is that they also cost more in brokers fees, making it even more difficult to make money, in many cases actually putting a cap on what can be made.
You can also buy options when most of the time value has run out, say the last few days of its life.
I have William F.Eng's "Options- Trading Strategies That Work" but, I repeat. I found that my best trades were straight, simple, buy and sell operations of one option.
Good luck
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