The Unlucky Investor's Guide to Options Trading

Picked this book up since I was watching a bunch of Tasty Videos on Youtube. I think for the most part the videos cover the topics in the book as well but the book goes slightly more in depth. I almost never finish any books but I finished this book to the end.It helped reinforce some of the ideas that I was learning on the videos.If you are interested in selling options for extra income this is definitely a must read.

Excited to receive the first printed work by someone at tastytrade. If you like quantitative theories, you will love this book by gifted mathematicians and tastytrade research team members Julia and Anton. But if you are looking for explanations of trading tips and strategies (e.g. strangles, spreads, butterflies, condors, etc.), this book may fall short of your expectations.As a devoted tastytrade follower since 2012, I was hoping “The Unlucky Investor’s Guide to Options Trading” would be a practical guide for trading options, based on tastytrade’s mechanics. Alas, it is not. If you’re looking for specific guideline for placing and managing options trades, look to tastytrade.com for their live and recorded material. Also, the information on tastytrade is more useful than any book I’ve read on the subject, and the raw, unedited content is refreshingly politically incorrect and extremely entertaining.Here are some insights into the book content:Page 54 correctly points out a key point of trading options, how it’s “common for IV to increase sharply prior to earnings and contract almost immediately.” This is a key point of selling options: sell options when premiums are HIGH, so you can maximize risk/return and can profit when volatility falls. The best way to see this is create a graph template on your trading platform of volatility overlaid on earnings dates; far more interesting and conclusive than this book’s minimally labeled graphs.I like how (pg 58) equates selling options with the house (slot machine owner); this is the basic doctrine of ex-CBOE floor traders Tom Sosnoff and Tony Battista on tastytrade.com. Tom (also creator of Think or Swim, Dough, and Tastyworks trading platforms) and Tony/BAT (Tom’s underrated and underappreciated friend, side-kick and co-host) back up their 40+ years of practical trading experience and general market knowledge with interesting research studies that show higher probability of profit selling options for a credit and managing them or letting them expire worthless (you keep the money you collected) than buying options.Pg 81 “Takeaways” #1 uses a lot of words that could be better summarized by Liz and Jenny’s mantra: “trade small, trade often” (Liz and Jenny are previous CBOE floor traders who co-host a live show on tastytrade.com). #2 doesn’t make sense – maybe she means that if you sell premium in periods of high volatility, you aren’t losing money from the option premium rising, but from the higher probability of large price swings.If you’re looking for trade mechanics, missing from “The Unlucky Investor’s Guide to Options Trading,” join TastyNation where you’ll find valuable information watching Tastytrade.com: Liz & Jny shows, “Options Trading Concepts” with Nick/Mike/Katie, Tom & Tony “Confirm & Send” and “What’s your Assumption”, “From Theory to Practice” with Dr. Jim and more. They are placing live trades into their own accounts and based on whether you are bullish or bearish, will help you find things to trades – tastytrade’s AlphaBoost slogan is “They’re your trades, we just help you find them.” PS I am not affiliated with tastytrade.

I have been trading options for about a year now. This is the best book I have read on the topic. It helps to have a fundamental understanding of mathematics to read the book, but it is presented in a way that is easy to understand. This book does a wonderful job of explaining options that is easy to understand without sacrificing rigor.

I'm an experienced options trader, and much of what the author describes using math up front I've internalized as intuition, common sense, and even the ability to visualize probabilities in my mind. That said, not everyone is like me, and I know there are some that will benefit from this. Of course, everyone needs to know "the Greeks" and this is where we meet those.I think this book really shines when it gets out of the math and into areas that other books may not cover, like the common sense subjects like buying power reduction in chapter 4, managing trades in chapter 6, and diversification and balancing capital in chapter 8.To me, the biggest part of options trading is to not lose, and by that I mean always know what the maximum loss is going into any trade, or series of trades, and to make sure trades balance each other, or offset each other, and there is not too much correlation between them.I might even recommending skipping chapter 1 at first and then going back and reading it last.

Unless you are a statistics genius, scan the 1st chapter and move on the meat of the book. The dense chapter on statistics sets up the foundational support for the rest of the book, but is not necessary to digest the usable information in the rest of the book. The ability to back test large data sets and put the methods described to practical use is invaluable. I will be using this book as a reference for many years.

An amazing book that I read twice in one week. It teaches everything that you need to know about trading options. It skips the empty talk and is focused on the real thing. I truly appreciate that this book was written. It helped me a lot.

I've been trading options for awhile and I'm also a fan of the Tastytrade network of shows where the authors work. I was worried this book would just be pages of dense math and statistics formulas without much practical application. The first few chapters are like this but the later chapters provide great practical advice. I especially liked the section on Portfolio allocation and position sizing. The book also makes clear that trading short premium does not guarantee outperformance of passive index investing, noting that a buy and hold approach outperformed a sample short premium portfolio during a strong bull market time period. Most folks are probably better off with an index fund. But if you must trade options buy this book.

I have been trading short options for some time and I consider myself relatively knowledgeable about this subject, but this book brought it to a different level. Julia does an outstanding job explaining how a trader can get take advantage of the statistical edge and she presents simple rules that will help traders to maximize their gains and more important preserve their capital. Very well written with an excellent didactics. This is one of the best books in options that I have ever read.

Esse livro cobre todos os aspectos fundamentais do mercado de opções, começando pelas fórmulas e conceitos matemáticos básicos, passando pela escolha de estratégias e indo até o gerenciamento da carteira. É um verdadeiro livro de referência prática e teórica, muito bem escrito, a ser consultado várias vezes.Achei melhor e mais completo do que Options Playbook, de Brian Overby (bastante prático quando o assunto é a montagem das estratégias, mas não cobre suficientemente conceitos importantes como margem, gerenciamento de carteira, gerenciamento de operação, eventos de cauda, etc.). Eu diria que os dois livros se complementam.As recomendações práticas do livro são constantemente baeadas em estudos dos dados do mercado norte-americano e exemplificadas com bons gráficos e tabelas. Os anexos com siglas, conceitos e fórmulas no final são muito bons.Iniciantes podem achar útil assistir alguns vídeos enquanto leem o livro. Davi Almeida, gestor que segue a escola de pensamento da autora, possui uma playlist de fundamentos no YouTube. Pode ser útil também começar pelo capítulo 10 ("Conclusão e Ideias Principais") e depois retomar do começo do livro.

Written by experts, concise, accurate. Requires moderate mathematics ability. Realistic, not one of those "I made $2 million in 6 months" style carnival pitches.

Para aprender sobre opciones es un basico, excelente punto de partida.

This books stays different In the world of fight between market prediction and highly efficent markets, a sensible approach for trading options.

Este libro muestra de una forma didáctica desde cero en qué consiste el concepto de volatilidad y cómo se puede utilizar para operar opciones. Además introduce conceptos importantes como la gestión de riesgos y cartera. Muy interesante.