Trading Weekly Options. Pricing Characteristics and Short-Term Trading Strategies

The essential resource for the successful option trader High Performance Options Trading offers a fresh perspective on trading options from a seasoned options trader programmer/engineer, Leonard Yates. Drawing on twenty-five years of experience as an options trader and software programmer, Yates has written this straightforward guide. First he provides readers with a solid foundation to trading options, including an introduction to basic options terminology, a thorough explanation on how options are traded, and specific trading strategies. Accompanied by the OptionVue Educational website, this hands-on guide to the options market is a thorough and essential resource for any trader looking to increase his or her practical knowledge of options.

An A to Z options trading guide for the new millennium and the new economy Written by professional trader and quantitative analyst Euan Sinclair, Option Trading is a comprehensive guide to this discipline covering everything from historical background, contract types, and market structure to volatility measurement, forecasting, and hedging techniques. This comprehensive guide presents the detail and practical information that professional option traders need, whether they're using options to hedge, manage money, arbitrage, or engage in structured finance deals. It contains information essential to anyone in this field, including option pricing and price forecasting, the Greeks, implied volatility, volatility measurement and forecasting, and specific option strategies. Explains how to break down a typical position, and repair positions Other titles by Sinclair: Volatility Trading Addresses the various concerns of the professional options trader Option trading will continue to be an important part of the financial landscape. This book will show you how to make the most of these profitable products, no matter what the market does.

A clear and practical guide to using binary options to speculate, hedge, and trade Trading Binary Options is a strategic primer on effectively navigating this fast-growing segment. With clear explanations and a practical perspective, this authoritative guide shows you how binaries work, the strategies that bring out their strengths, how to integrate them into your current strategies, and much more. This updated second edition includes new coverage of Cantor-Fitzgerald binaries, New York Stock Exchange binaries, and how to use binaries to hedge trading, along with expert insight on the markets in which binaries are available. Independent traders and investors will find useful guidance on speculating on price movements or hedging their stock portfolios using these simple, less complex options with potentially substantial impact. Binary options provide either a fixed payout or nothing at all. While it sounds simple enough, using them effectively requires a more nuanced understanding of how, where, and why they work. This book provides the critical knowledge you need to utilize binary options to optimal effect. Learn hedging and trading strategies specific to binaries Choose the markets with best liquidity and lowest expenses Find the right broker for your particular binary options strategy Utilize binaries in conjunction with other strategies Popular in the over-the-counter market, binary options are frequently used to hedge or speculate on commodities, currencies, interest rates, and stock indices. They have become available to retail traders through the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the American Stock Exchange, as well as various online platforms, allowing you the opportunity to add yet another tool to your investing arsenal. Trading Binary Options is the essential resource for traders seeking clear guidance on these appealing options.

Hugely popular market guru updates his popular trading strategy for a post-crisis world From Larry Williams—one of the most popular and respected technical analysts of the past four decades—Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading, Second Edition provides the blueprint necessary for sound and profitable short-term trading in a post-market meltdown economy. In this updated edition of the evergreen trading book, Williams shares his years of experience as a highly successful short-term trader, while highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of what can be a very fruitful yet potentially dangerous endeavor. Offers market wisdom on a wide range of topics, including chaos, speculation, volatility breakouts, and profit patterns Explains fundamentals such as how the market moves, the three most dominant cycles, when to exit a trade, and how to hold on to winners Includes in-depth analysis of the most effective short-term trading strategies, as well as the author's winning technical indicators Short-term trading offers tremendous upside. At the same time, the practice is also extremely risky. Minimize your risk and maximize your opportunities for success with Larry Williams's Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading, Second Edition.

A guide to using the VIX to forecast and trade markets Known as the fear index, the VIX provides a snapshot of expectations about future stock market volatility and generally moves inversely to the overall stock market. Trading VIX Derivatives will show you how to use the Chicago Board Options Exchange's S&P 500 volatility index to gauge fear and greed in the market, use market volatility to your advantage, and hedge stock portfolios. Engaging and informative, this book skillfully explains the mechanics and strategies associated with trading VIX options, futures, exchange traded notes, and options on exchange traded notes. Many market participants look at the VIX to help understand market sentiment and predict turning points. With a slew of VIX index trading products now available, traders can use a variety of strategies to speculate outright on the direction of market volatility, but they can also utilize these products in conjunction with other instruments to create spread trades or hedge their overall risk. Reviews how to use the VIX to forecast market turning points, as well as reveals what it takes to implement trading strategies using VIX options, futures, and ETNs Accessible to active individual traders, but sufficiently sophisticated for professional traders Offers insights on how volatility-based strategies can be used to provide diversification and enhance returns Written by Russell Rhoads, a top instructor at the CBOE's Options Institute, this book reflects on the wide range of uses associated with the VIX and will interest anyone looking for profitable new forecasting and trading techniques.

A top options trader details a practical approach for pricing and trading options in any market condition The options market is always changing, and in order to keep up with it you need the greeks—delta, gamma, theta, vega, and rho—which are the best techniques for valuing options and executing trades regardless of market conditions. In the Second Edition of Trading Options Greeks, veteran options trader Dan Pasarelli puts these tools in perspective by offering fresh insights on option trading and valuation. An essential guide for both professional and aspiring traders, this book explains the greeks in a straightforward and accessible style. It skillfully shows how they can be used to facilitate trading strategies that seek to profit from volatility, time decay, or changes in interest rates. Along the way, it makes use of new charts and examples, and discusses how the proper application of the greeks can lead to more accurate pricing and trading as well as alert you to a range of other opportunities. Completely updated with new material Information on spreads, put-call parity and synthetic options, trading volatility, and advanced option trading is also included Explores how to exploit the dynamics of option pricing to improve your trading Having a comprehensive understanding of the greeks is essential to long-term options trading success. Trading Options Greeks, Second Edition shows you how to use the greeks to find better trades, effectively manage them, and ultimately, become more profitable.

The recent financial crisis brought to light many of the misunderstandings and misuses of exotic derivatives. With market participants on both the buy and sell-side having been found guilty of not understanding the products they were dealing with, never before has there been a greater need for clarification and explanation. Exotic Options and Hybrids is a practical guide to structuring, pricing and hedging complex exotic options and hybrid derivatives that will serve readers through the recent crisis, the road to recovery, the next bull market and beyond. Written by experienced practitioners, it focuses on the three main parts of a derivative’s life: the structuring of a product, its pricing and its hedging. Divided into four parts, the book covers a multitude of structures, encompassing many of the most up-to-date and promising products from exotic equity derivatives and structured notes to hybrid derivatives and dynamic strategies. Based on a realistic setting from the heart of the business, inside a derivatives operation, the practical and intuitive discussions of these aspects make these exotic concepts truly accessible. Adoptions of real trades are examined in detail, and all of the numerous examples are carefully selected so as to highlight interesting and significant aspects of the business. The introduction of payoff structures is accompanied by scenario analysis, diagrams and lifelike sample term sheets. Readers learn how to spot where the risks lie to pave the way for sound valuation and hedging of such products. There are also questions and accompanying discussions dispersed in the text, each exploited to illustrate one or more concepts from the context in which they are set. The applications, the strengths and the limitations of various models are highlighted, in relevance to the products and their risks, rather than the model implementations. Models are de-mystified in separately dedicated sections, but their implications are alluded to throughout the book in an intuitive and non-mathematical manner. By discussing exotic options and hybrids in a practical, non-mathematical and highly intuitive setting, this book will blast through the misunderstanding of exotic derivatives, enabling practitioners to fully understand and correctly structure, price and hedge theses products effectively, and stand strong as the only book in its class to make these “exotic” concepts truly accessible.

This book shows traders how to use Intermarket Analysis to forecast future equity, index and commodity price movements. It introduces custom indicators and Intermarket based systems using basic mathematical and statistical principles to help traders develop and design Intermarket trading systems appropriate for long term, intermediate, short term and day trading. The metastock code for all systems is included and the testing method is described thoroughly. All systems are back tested using at least 200 bars of historical data and compared using various profitability and drawdown metrics.

Learn both the theory and practice of pairs trading, why it is consistently profitable, and how you can apply the strategies in your own trading with this valuable guide. Author Douglas Ehrman covers pairs trading involving stocks, options on stocks, and futures contracts, and explains how this type of trading allows you to profit from the changing price relationship of securities. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of the theories involved, he also includes practical examples that will to help you put what you've learned into practice. Douglas S. Ehrman is a hedge fund manager and a leading authority on pairs trading. He is one of the founders and the Chief Executive Officer of AlphAmerica Asset Management LLC in Chicago. He also served as the chief executive officer of AlphAmerica Financial, Inc., the company that operated PairsTrading.com prior to its merger with PairTrader.com.

Written by an experienced trader and consultant, Frans de Weert’s Exotic Options Trading offers a risk-focused approach to the pricing of exotic options. By giving readers the necessary tools to understand exotic options, this book serves as a manual to equip the reader with the skills to price and risk manage the most common and the most complex exotic options. De Weert begins by explaining the risks associated with trading an exotic option before dissecting these risks through a detailed analysis of the actual economics and Greeks rather than solely stating the mathematical formulae. The book limits the use of mathematics to explain exotic options from an economic and risk perspective by means of real life examples leading to a practical interpretation of the mathematical pricing formulae. The book covers conventional options, digital options, barrier options, cliquets, quanto options, outperformance options and variance swaps, and explains difficult concepts in simple terms, with a practical approach that gives the reader a full understanding of every aspect of each exotic option. The book also discusses structured notes with exotic options embedded in them, such as reverse convertibles, callable and puttable reverse convertibles and autocallables and shows the rationale behind these structures and their associated risks. For each exotic option, the author makes clear why there is an investor demand; explains where the risks lie and how this affects the actual pricing; shows how best to hedge any vega or gamma exposure embedded in the exotic option and discusses the skew exposure. By explaining the practical implications for every exotic option and how it affects the price, in addition to the necessary mathematical derivations and tools for pricing exotic options, Exotic Options Trading removes the mystique surrounding exotic options in order to give the reader a full understanding of every aspect of each exotic option, creating a useable tool for dealing with exotic options in practice. “Although exotic options are not a new subject in finance, the coverage traditionally afforded by many texts is either too high level or overly mathematical. De Weert's exceptional text fills this gap superbly. It is a rigorous treatment of a number of exotic structures and includes numerous examples to clearly illustrate the principles. What makes this book unique is that it manages to strike a fantastic balance between the theory and actual trading practice. Although it may be something of an overused phrase to describe this book as compulsory reading, I can assure any reader they will not be disappointed.” —Neil Schofield, Training Consultant and author of Commodity Derivatives: Markets and Applications “Exotic Options Trading does an excellent job in providing a succinct and exhaustive overview of exotic options. The real edge of this book is that it explains exotic options from a risk and economical perspective and provides a clear link to the actual profit and pricing formulae. In short, a must read for anyone who wants to get deep insights into exotic options and start trading them profitably.” —Arturo Bignardi