Category: Options

  • Easy as ABC: How To Trade Alphabet (GOOG) Using Options

    Alphabet is a strong contender in the tech space, with several growth opportunities available to them They are rapidly expanding their artificial intelligence and cloud platforms, while maintaining focus on their core competency, the search engine. They have strong financials, with positive cash flows and continued revenue growth They are an expensive stock to trade, […]

  • Staying Neutral: Employing The Swiss Strategy through GLD

    One of the best things about trading options is the math behind it. Place your strikes based on the deltas. Adjust for your desired probability of profit and risk/reward appetite. Trade in a 45 day cycle. Roll. Place a new trade. Rinse and repeat.

  • Futures, Forwards, and SPOTS: How the World Can Trade Pork Bellies Without Ever Touching a Pig

    Confession: I normally don’t do much research outside of options and long stock. Not because the other platforms are some terrible place where people are yelling about pork bellies and soybeans, but simply because I don’t really understand it. So to make up for admitting my weaknesses in finance on my finance blog, I decided […]

  • Trading Naked: How to Cover Your Assets

    I recently had a conversation with a good friend of mine. Our friendship blossomed when he talked about puts one day in our Applied Investments class. My head whipped around to locate the person that was finally speaking my language, and once we did the options trader secret handshake, we became fast friends. One of […]

  • Trading Options: Deriving the Value of a Derivative

    One of the biggest questions that I get asked is: “What’s the point of trading options?” I give the usual spiel: Reduce your cost-basis (how much you pay for a trade) Increase your profitability (the chance you have to make money) Increase the number of trades you can make, putting the law of large numbers […]

  • Smart Money: The Poor Man’s Covered Call

    In my most recent blog post, I talked about shorting/selling a call, aka a covered call. This technique is used as a way to reduce cost basis against shares held, and can also be used as an income generation technique for larger accounts. However, not everyone has a large account (I definitely don’t). So what […]

  • Extreme Couponing: Stock Edition

    In the show, Extreme Couponing, people clip out mass amounts of coupons to accumulate mass amount of goods for absolute pennies. In the very first episode, a woman uses coupons to only pay $100 on her $2,000 grocery bill. Sounds pretty nice, to save $1,900 right? What if I told you that you could do […]

  • Trading TBT: It’s Throwback Time to Bonds

    The premium in the market is pretty low right now, and we are just on the tail end of earnings season. We look for stocks that have high volatility (thus, high premium) and don’t have any upcoming earnings. So when I was looking for a trade to place, I was met with a screen full […]

  • The Chicago Cubs Saga: How to Turn Losing into Winning

    The Chicago Cubs had a legendary losing streak.It had been 108 years since they had won the World Series (1908), and a 71 year gap from the last time that they had even qualified for the Series itself (1945). That all changed when they won the World Series in 2016.

  • How to Make Money When the Market Declines

    When you take a trade off, you need to put one back on again. So that’s just what I did. I was looking at the Dough platform and running through the checklist in my head: