THE OPTIONS & FUTURES GUIDE
Clear explanations, practical strategies, and tools to help you understand every trade.
Learn how options and futures work, compare strategy payoffs, and understand the potential losses as well as gains. Educational examples do not guarantee profitable results.
Discover new trading opportunities and the various ways of diversifying your investment portfolio with commodity and financial futures.
To help you along in your path towards understanding the complex world of financial derivatives, we offer a comprehensive futures and options trading education resource that includes detailed tutorials, tips and advice right here at The Options Guide.
Profit graphs show the possible outcomes of an options strategy: profit or loss against the underlying stock price at expiration.
Use your outlook, risk preference, and position structure to find a matching strategy.
Find an options strategyOption Basics
Before you begin trading options, you should know what exactly is a stock option and understand the two basic types of option contracts - puts and calls. Learn how they work and how to trade them for profits.
Read moreBinary Option Basics
Binary option trading is quickly gaining popularity since their introduction in 2008. Check out our complete guide to trading binary options.
Read moreBeginner Strategy
The covered call is a popular option trading strategy that enables a stockholder to earn additional income by selling calls against a holding of their stock.
Read moreStock Option Advice
Buying straddles is a great way to play earnings. Many a times, stock price gap up or down following the quarterly earnings report but often, the direction of the movement can be unpredictable. For instance, a sell off can occur even though the earnings report is good if investors had expected great results.
Read moreStock Option Trading Basics
Learn how options and futures work, compare strategy payoffs, and understand the potential losses as well as gains. Educational examples do not guarantee profitable results.
Read moreAdvanced Concepts
When trading options, you will come across the use of certain greek alphabets such as delta or gamma when describing risks associated with various options positions. They are known as "the greeks".
Read moreOption Trading Advice
Many options traders tend to overlook the effects of commission charges on their overall profit or loss. It's easy to forget about the lowly $15 commission fee when every profitable trade nets you $500 or more. Heck, it's only 3% right?.
Read moreStock Options Advice
Cash dividends issued by stocks have big impact on their option prices. This is because the underlying stock price is expected to drop by the dividend amount on the ex-dividend date.
Read moreAdvanced Concepts
Learn about the put call ratio, the way it is derived and how it can be used as a contrarian indicator.
Read moreAdvanced Concepts
Another way to play the futures market is via options on futures. Using options to trade futures offer additional leverage and open up more trading opportunities for the seasoned trader.
Read moreStock Option Advice
Day trading options can be a successful, profitable strategy but there are a couple of things you need to know before you start using options for day trading.
Read moreStock Options Tutorial
If you are very bullish on a particular stock for the long term and is looking to purchase the stock but feels that it is slightly overvalued at the moment, then you may want to consider writing put options on the stock as a means to acquire it at a discount.
Read moreStock Options Advice
To achieve higher returns in the stock market, besides doing more homework on the companies you wish to buy, it is often necessary to take on higher risk. A most common way to do that is to buy stocks on margin.
Read moreStock Option Tutorial
Some stocks pay generous dividends every quarter. You qualify for the dividend if you are holding on the shares before the ex-dividend date.
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