The Bible of Options Strategies: The Definitive Guide for Practical Trading Strategies
“Guy Cohen is the master when it comes to taming the complexities of options. From buying calls and puts to iron butterflies and condors, Guy explains these strategies in a clear and concise manner that options traders of any level can understand. His chapter on options and taxes is especially welcomed (and needed). The Bible of Options Strategies is a straightforward, easy-to-use reference work that should occupy a space on any options trader’s bookshelf.”
–Bernie Schaeffer, Chairman and
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Definitely a reference book, not a manual,
Guy Cohen lays out just about every option strategy that you could make work, given the right market conditions and your tolerance for risk. I would certainly put this book in the “Reference Book” category — something that you would take out on occasion to answer a query about how a certain trade is placed or when it’s a good strategy to use.
I started out with the intent of reading it from cover to cover. But I have to admit that I ended up skipping a lot of the material after reading the first 100 pages or so because it gets somewhat repetitious. So this indeed makes a good reference book, say, when you hear someone mention a “Long Put Condor” and wonder what it is. Or if you forget what market conditions (volatile, neutral, etc) would be required for a Bear Call Spread to work well. Also, I do appreciate Guy’s organization of strategies by Risk/Reward, Direction, Volatility, etc. That makes it easy to get a short list of strategies given your own trading style and the market conditions.
What I found missing that I wish was there is information like how far from Option Expiry should this strategy be placed, what is an optimum range of IV for the underlying stock for each type of strategy, when should the strategy be repaired or exited? How do you repair it, or leg in or out successfully?
Also, I still do not understand what the little charts mean at the end of each strategy. I understand that they represent some kind of profile for each of the greeks, but there’s no scale or indicators on the axes, nor can I find an explanation of what the dotted, dashed and solid lines mean. Maybe it’s just me, since I’ve only been trading options for about a year now. If you’re an experienced option trader, you’ll probably know what they mean.
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|Systematic Options Coverage,
Options trader Guy Cohen has captured the beauty of options as a flexible trading vehicle with this book.
He reduces more than 60 options strategies strategy into five key areas:
1. Income strategies
2. Volatility strategies
3. Sideways market strategies
4. Leveraged strategies
5. Synthetic strategies.
Even the newest trader will find his insightful explanations of the most complex strategies clear and concise. This would be the book to have by your side if you were looking for a definitive guide to contemporary options trading if it were not so poorly edited. The mistakes distract from what would be a masterpiece on options trading.
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|Options Reference,
This hardcover should not be your first reading about options. It assumes that you are already familiar with options trading, and just want a reference book at hand.
For each strategy, e.g. “Short Iron Butterfly”, there is a description, context (outlook, rationale, net position, effect of time decay, appropriate time period to trade, ways of selecting the stock and options), risk profile, Greeks, advantages and disadvantages, ways of exiting the trade, and an example.
However, the ways to select an option are not always adequately covered. For example, in the “short (naked) put” strategy, the author simply writes “Give yourself as little time to be wrong”. The concept of Annualized Premium is not covered, there is no method given to select the best option from different strike prices and expiration dates. If you are interested in this technique, you can find it in “Options as a Strategic Investment” by Lawrence McMillan, chapter 19, or there is a special book “Using Options to Buy Stocks” by Dennis Eisen.
You may keep this book as a quick reference, but if you didn’t read anything about options yet, I have some recommendations. If you are not quite familiar with the stock market, I would suggest “The Options Course” by George Fontanills and Richard Cawood. If you did buy stocks already, then skim through Trading Options For Dummies by George A. Fontanills; or Options Made Easy by the same author as of the reviewed book.
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