Home > Options Trading Basics
Buying Options
The most basic of options strategies is to simply buy call or put options. The price you pay to own the option is called the premium which is affected by many factors such as moneyness, time to expiration and underlying volatility.
Generally, when you are bullish on the underlying stock, you buy call options to implement the long call strategy and when bearish, you buy put options to implement the long put strategy.
In both cases, you hope that the underlying stock price move far enough to cover the premiums paid for the options and land you a profit.
Optionable Stocks
Not all stocks have options listed for trading. There are some criterias that the public company will need to meet before their stock options can be listed for trading. To find out whether options are available for trading, the simplest way is to enter the stock ticker symbol to retrieve the stock quote information and find out if there is a corresponding options chain available. The availability of an options chain will mean that there are options being traded for that stock.
