Want to learn how to trade options

Investopedia will give you a decent overview and it's online and was free

Once you start trading options, losing thousands in just a few minutes feels like nothing.

Check out the youtube videos on it. They are better than any explanation you will get here.

Start selling covered calls on one of the stocks you own. Quickest way to learn.

After seeing the commercial about 300 times on CNBC and trading options for awhile, I ordered Follow the Smart Money by Jon and Pete Najarian. It’s actually a really good book on options. It’s written in a way that assumes you know nothing about options. A lot of football analogies since they both played in the NFL. It explains all the Greeks and the most popular options strategies.

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Investopedia will give you a decent overview and it's online and was free

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Very good starting point. Investopedia does an excellent job of helping beginners understand the terminology, how trades settle and which strategies are appropriate for various market conditions. With options, whether you’re going long or short, the “why/when” is at least important as the “how”... maybe more so, because the why/when will help you understand how to calculate risks and potential returns.

Don’t anybody take this the wrong way, cause I don’t mean it as a shot. But simply buying calls (blindly) and hoping that the stock pops, is not really options *trading* - that’s just slot machine type gambling. It’s fine to buy a lotto ticket every now and again. But whatever you’re doing with options, you have to understand implied volatility as it relates to option pricing, as well as the concept of theta/time decay.

As Nated14 said, Investopedia gives a great overview, as well as details. And depending on what type of trading you want to explore, OptionsAlpa and TastyTrade provide great, detailed (and free) resources for those wanting to learn premium selling (what I do). They both have YouTube channels too. The Najarian brothers are more into long strategies, but there are ways to do that without taking big premium hits - they can teach you how to do that. The firm that I deal with is SMB Capital, and they have a YouTube channel as well.

Although it’s tempting to watch, I’d avoid the CNBC show Options Action like the plague. The traders are seasoned and experienced. But the trades they typically offer are buy a call and hope, or trades you’d give to someone you really don’t like (I call them ex-wife trades).

You can make consistent and above average returns if you learn and develop a plan. You can make a living doing it... and you can do it in bull and bear markets. But you have to be serious and disciplined.

GL.

Definitely.

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or trades you’d give to someone you really don’t like (I call them ex-wife trades).

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can you give an example of this? What type of trades do they offer?

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a majority of the time I just pick another date and strike and do it again.

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as in, the option expires OTM and you just keep the premium correct?
and on the cash side if there’s a chance of having to buy the shares you keep 100x the strike price as collateral?

great post BTW

I'll second Cgrand's comment on starting your own thread. You could probably start your own Discord channel, or go to the one for MT and get a ton of listeners & learners if you wanted to.