Trading Strategies, Basic Concepts

There are several basic trading strategies, but in order to execute any of them successfully an investor new to options will need to know some elementary concepts.
The most basic are the call and the put. Buying a call confers the right, but not the obligation, to buy at a pre-set price. Puts grant the buyer [...]

Risk Management

There are more kinds of risk than there are investments, since every instrument carries several kinds. But risk isn’t inherently bad. Without it there’d be fewer opportunities for profit.
The fundamental risk, of course, is price uncertainty. No one knows for sure whether GOOG (the symbol for Google stock) will be higher tomorrow or lower.
Options, like [...]

Risks and Advantages of Futures

The terms ‘options’ and ‘futures’ appear together often enough to confuse even knowledgeable traders into thinking they are the same thing. But, while they have important similarities, options and futures are distinct trading instruments.
An option is a contract conferring the right to its buyer to purchase an underlying asset at a fixed price (the ’strike [...]