The Complete Guide to Option Selling [Hardcover]

Selling naked options, long considered profitable for professional traders but too risky for most investors, has been surging in popularity. The Complete Guide to Options Selling avoids dry, complex theory and jargon in favor of a simple, direct approach that sophisticated investors can use to produce surprisingly consistent results with only slightly increased risk. This down-to-earth book explains how to apply market fundamentals--while avoiding common options trading mistakes--to make options selling a profitable part of any portfolio strategy.

Option writing strategies that can dramatically improve your odds of profiting--despite what your broker might tell you

Fewer than 10 percent of options are ever exercised, representing a total loss to the buyer left holding the option at expiration. Who wins?

The seller who wrote the option, and now keeps the collected premium, free and clear. The Complete Guide to Option Selling shows you how to consistently be on that winning side, outlining a clear, high-probability approach for augmenting investment returns through selling options. Avoiding complex theory and mathematics to focus on a technique that can be understood and implemented by any investor, this straightforward book explains:

• The basic mechanics of selling options and profiting from "time premium"
• Numerous advantages of selling options versus the more common, and lower probability, strategy of buying options
• Professional strategies for selecting optimum markets and options

Retail brokers who downplay option selling as "too risky" don't understand that, when done correctly, the risk of option selling is actually very manageable. The Complete Guide to Option Selling will show you how to take full advantage of option selling, and make it a profitable and lower-risk component of your overall portfolio program.

Increasing numbers of investors are looking beyond unwarranted fears of "unlimited risk" to see option selling for what it really is--a commonsense, risk-controlled approach that dramatically improves an investor's chances of profiting while providing better-than-average returns in every type of market.

The Complete Guide to Option Selling explains how to make option writing on futures a profitable part of your trading and investing program. Unlike most options books, seemingly written for quants and mathematicians, it explains in plain English who wins and who loses in the options game, then provides step-by-step strategies for staying on the winning side.

Authors James Cordier and Michael Gross are active futures brokers with decades of combined experience in the futures trading industry. In The Complete Guide to Option Selling they cut years from your learning curve with hands-on details including:

• Why selling options on futures is markedly similar to selling options on equities, with far better profit potential
• How to select the right market, strike price, and month to improve the likelihood that options you write will expire worthless
• Strategies for controlling risk by selling far out of the money options, with low deltas, diversified across different markets
• All about SPAN margin--the key to consistently high returns
• Fundamentals of select futures markets, from soybeans and corn to cattle, energies, precious metals, and others
• How to utilize reliable seasonal tendencies, along with examples of the most consistently tradable patterns
• Six mistakes new option sellers commonly make, and how to learn from and preempt them in your own account
• Methods for trading profitably without spending hours each week studying the markets

Professional investors have relied on the proven performance and stability of option selling for decades. They know that, while no investment strategy can be both lucrative and risk-free, option selling provides a risk/reward ratio that is difficult if not impossible to come by in any other investment.

The Complete Guide to Option Selling explains the why, what, where, and how of writing options. Written for the individual investor, it reveals techniques you can use to seamlessly integrate the knowledgeable writing of options into your own investment program.