Options Trading
How common option strategies work: bull call and bear put spreads, calendars, covered calls, protective puts, strangles, straddles, risk reversals, guts, and butterflies.
Put option strategies showing long put, put spread, and protective put with payoff diagrams
The main fixed income options are government bonds and corporate bonds. How they differ in yield and risk, and what duration, credit risk, and the yield curve mean.
A straddle buys a call and put at the same strike; a strangle buys an out-of-the-money call and put at different strikes. Both profit from a large move in either direction.
An option price is intrinsic value plus time value, driven by stock price, strike, time, volatility, rates and dividends. Black-Scholes, binomial models and Greeks.
How traders approach SPY options: common strategies, the role of scanning and risk management, and how to analyze SPY option data in Excel with MarketXLS.
The bid is the highest price a buyer will pay for an option; the ask is the lowest price a seller will accept. How the bid-ask spread affects your cost.
Pull a live option chain into Excel with =QM_GetOptionChain("AAPL") and read each column: strike, premium, implied volatility, delta, and expiration.
Get live option prices in Excel with MarketXLS: pull a full option chain or a single contract, plus what drives option prices and how to model P/L.
Options swing trading holds call or put positions for a few days to a few weeks to capture a price swing. The basics: technical entries, risk limits, and profit targets.
In-the-money options have intrinsic value: calls with strikes below the stock price, puts with strikes above. How ITM options behave, their uses, and risks.
Understanding option symbols breakdown showing underlying, expiration, type, and strike components
Commodity options give the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a commodity (usually a futures contract) at a set price. How they work, how hedgers use them, and the risks for buyers and sellers.
High IV options carry high implied volatility, so their premiums price in bigger expected moves. What that means for buyers, sellers, and spreads.
Open interest is the number of option contracts still open at the end of the day. How it differs from volume, what changes in it signal, and how to use it.
Vega is how much an option price changes for a 1 percentage point change in implied volatility. How long and short vega positions work and how to calculate vega in Excel.