Options for the Stock Investor: How to Use Options to Enhance and Protect Returns (Hardcover)

by James Bittman (Author)

McGraw-Hill’s classic options bestseller, Options for the Stock Investor, has been updated to reflect changes in the options market. This extensively revised second edition features all-new material describing electronic trading, decimalization, and single stock futures, along with increasingly popular vehicles such as stock indexes, LEAPs, and exchangetraded funds. The CD-ROM contains all-new OP-EVAL II software, which eliminates guesswork while providing handson information on spreads, position Greeks, and “what-if” forecasting and graphing features.

From the Back Cover
[BACK COVER] [CATEGORY] Investing [CORNER CUT/READING LINE] Includes powerful Op-Eval4™ option analysis software [HEAD] Praise for the 1st Edition:

“The thoroughness of the coverage makes this exceptionally valuable reading for the … investor who’d like to add some sophistication in establishing and managing his stock holdings by using options.”

--Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities

[HEAD]

Straightforward option strategies that reduce your risk and increase your profit potential in virtually any investing or trading program

Options for the Stock Investor, Second Edition introduces you to the many ways you can use options to generate guaranteed cash flow, lower the cost basis of your stocks, increase your trading leverage and profit potential, and more.

Updated from its bestselling first edition to provide you with new option techniques and strategies, this comprehensive handbook explores:

• Risk-reduction strategies for conservative investors, including buying calls and covered writing
• Profit-generating strategies for aggressive traders, including vertical spreads, straddles, and strangles
• Flexible strategies for improving your risk/return profile, including covered straddles, covered combos and ratio spreads

Options for the Stock Investor, Second Edition details how investors can use options to effectively control the risk of holding stock positions, and outlines aggressive strategies traders can use to improve their leverage and profit potential.

[FLAP COPY]

Over the past decade, the best selling Options for the Stock Investor has shown thousands of stock investors how to use options to protect their portfolios from bad earnings reports, management miscues, and other unexpected events. Over that same period, scores of new trading rules and products have made options more viable and valuable for trades as well as investors.

Options for the Stock Investor, Second Edition, is updated and expanded to detail the many ways in which options can help you improve your investing performance over both the short- and long-term. Featuring a number of new strategies you can use to enhance your investment performance, whatever your investment style, this hands-on guide provides you with:

• Step-by-step explanations of what options are and how they work
• Detailed examples of option behavior in a wide variety of market environments
• Diagrams to help you visualize the profit or loss potential of every trade before you place it
• Insights into the psychological differences between investing and trading
• Examples of ratio spreads, and how they can be used as a “stock repair” for long positions or as a riskier, more high-profit, strategy for advanced traders
• Strategies for using options to improve the performance of exchange-traded funds, stock indexes, LEAPS, and other popular investment vehicles
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  Op-Eval4™ software, provided free with Options for the Stock Investor, allows you to apply option-pricing formulas to options on individual stocks and indexes, and options that are subject to both American-style and European-Style exercise. The features and capabilities of this program increase the transparency of each option trade you make, allowing you to analyze option prices, calculate theoretical option values, graph numerous option only and option/stock strategies, and more.

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  An all-stock strategy has become far too uncertain for investors looking to improve stock market returns while protecting those returns, especially with the numerous risk-controlling tools that are available to those investors.

  Options are the most versatile and valuable of those tools. Options for the Stock investor, 2nd Edition, shows you how to master the mechanics of options, develop realistic expectations of options behavior in virtually every type of market, and incorporate the protection and profit potential of options into your overall trading and investing program.

  James Bittman is senior staff instructor at The Options Institute, the educational arm of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. He has been a successful options trader for more than two decades, and is the author of Trading Index Options, and Trading and Hedging with Agricultural Futures and Options and co-author of Options: Essential Concepts.