The Options &
Futures Guide

Learn option trading and you can profit from any market condition. Understand how to trade the options market using the wide range of option strategies.

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.

Options Strategy Search Engine

72 strategies
Options strategy payoff diagram

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.

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Option Basics

What are Stock Options?

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.

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Beginner Strategy

Covered Calls

The covered call is a popular option trading strategy that enables a stockholder to earn additional income by selling calls against a holding of his stock.

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Stock Option Advice

Buying Straddles into Earnings

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.

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Stock Option Trading Basics

Why Invest with Options?

For the short to medium term investor, stock option investing provide an additional suite of investment options to let him make better use of his investment capital.

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Advanced Concepts

Understanding Option Greeks

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".

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Stock Options Advice

Effect of Dividends on Option Pricing

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.

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Advanced Concepts

Futures Options Trading

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.

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Stock Option Advice

Day Trading using Options

Day trading options can be a successful, profitable strategy but there are a couple of things you need to know before you use start using options for day trading.

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Stock Options Tutorial

Writing Puts to Purchase Stocks

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.

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Stock Options Advice

Leverage using Calls, Not Margin Calls

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.

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