(Larger Image)
|
Getting Started in Options (Getting Started In.....)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Wiley (2007-08-31)
ISBN: 0470138068
EAN: 9780470138069
Dewey Decimal #: 332.632283
Binding/Media: Paperback - 383 pages
Edition: 7
|
Editorial Reviews
|
Product Description
Discover the Dynamic World of Options Investing
Getting Started In Options
Seventh Edition
Many people fail to capitalize on the potentially lucrative opportunities that options present, simply because they don't fully understand how options work. But with Getting Started in Options, Seventh Edition, author Michael C. Thomsett looks to change this.
Written in a straightforward and accessible style, Getting Started in Options, Seventh Edition provides you with a solid foundation in this field, and will help you become fully familiar with one of today's most important investment vehicles. Each page of this informative guide addresses essential options issues, including how to:
*
Identify your own risk tolerance levels and decide how to effectively incorporate options into your own portfolio
*
Master options terminology and concepts
*
Use options in a powerful insurance strategy to protect against losses in stock investments
*
Perform "paper trades" before putting real money at risk
*
Utilize the many new online resources available to you
*
Understand time values, striking price, and expiration
Besides new examples, updated charts, and timely investor tips, this latest edition also includes important new chapters that reflect ongoing innovations within the options market, such as the many uses of options beyond their obvious buying and selling functions, different methods available to calculate returns on options trades, and much more.
You don't need to be a financial expert to make it in the world of options, but you do need to be well informed. With Getting Started in Options, Seventh Edition as your guide you'll quickly discover how to make options work for you.
|
Amazon.com Review
Anyone mystified by stock options or who simply dismisses them as too speculative will find Getting Started in Options an excellent first read on the subject. Beginning with the premise that it's not the complexity of the investment but that of its language that makes options difficult for new investors to understand, author Michael C. Thomsett has created a guided tour through the lexicon. The result is a nontechnical introduction to these specialized markets. The book carefully and completely defines the terminology, explains options investing step by step, and presents strategies so that it is easy to understand at each level of risk involved. Choosing the right stock, buying and selling options, and combining techniques are all covered in increasing complexity, but this is a book for beginners, and those with basic knowledge of the subject will want to seek out more advanced reading. The biggest drawback of this book is that, for some reason, the text is printed in green ink, making it somewhat more difficult to read and probably impossible for those who are green-colorblind. Publisher, take note! --Scott Harrison
|
Customer Reviews
|
Dwells Too Much on the Basics
Rating  (3)
Date: 2010-08-28
Thomsett's wordy and repetitive explanations of buying Puts and Calls and selling Covered Calls fills about 180 pages of his 210 - page text. He relegates the more interesting discussion of combined techniques to the last 20 pages. Here he gives you enough information to perk your interest, but not enough to motivate you to try these techniques. For example none of the figures in Chapter 9 suggest that you can loose money trading spreads, straddles and strangles
|
|
Excellent Book
Rating  (5)
Date: 2010-07-09
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
I loved this book. I gave it to my mother when she was interested in options after she saw my success. My success has come from a year and a half of study of the markets, small time investments, and a dead on focus of the securities market, though I am beginning to expand out there into futures contracts, which I've gotten the Getting Started in Futures book, which I think is average compared to others, but that's a different review.
Getting Started with Options is your basic guide to what you need to know about options before you start using them. For the every day investor, they're a great tool for speculation when your capital is tied up, or it's a, "if this happens" moment, and you don't want to risk a lot of capital for what will surely be a gap up or gap down scenario. This was one of the first books I got on options, and though I wouldn't accredit it with my first twenty thousand dollar trade that cost me a total of two thousand dollars, or my ten thousand dollar trade that cost me a little more than a hundred and fifty dollars, counting commission, Brian Burns book, and Lawerence McMillians book are to thank for that, I accredit this book with giving me all the preliminary knowledge in easy to understand writing that didn't complicate, or make Options look scary.
I would feel wrong if I didn't say that I consider stock options less risky than stocks as a "Trading" tool (as an investment, the risk is about equal). Unlike stocks where you need a massive amount of capital, 2,000 dollars to buy a hundred shares of a twenty dollar stock. 5,000 for a fifty dollar stock, in which case, you might tell yourself that if it goes down three points (300 dollars) you'll sell, but one day, wake up in the morning to discover that some news has driven the stock way down in the pre-market, and be out a thousand (any long term investors or intermediate trader has been there once or twice I'm sure) with options, you know your loss right off the bat, and need limited capital. That to me has always been the one thing I hated about stocks (I learned to manage the risk, but I now much prefer options), so little control over how much I'm willing to lose, since I don't want to lose the entire investment in a stock. 90% of the time, that doesn't happen, if a stock goes down, you get stopped out, or you can choose to sell, but it's that other ten percent that can leave a pit in your stomach, wondering how you missed it. Options to me, if you're trading the contracts and treating them like a trade, with position sizing, money management, and a systematic strategy, options become one of the safest things to trade, and get a bad name because your investment can become worthless (which to me is ridiculous since you can trade with so little money). But the risk/reward ratio is much better. An example, than back to the review. You buy a .25 cent ($25) July option that XYZ is going to 30 dollars. It's at 27, the next day, the stock goes up to 29 dollars, the contract is now worth .40 ($40), then the next day it goes up to 30.10 cents, the contract is worth .80 cents ($80) that's a 220 percent gain on investment. Had you bought a hundred shares at 27.00 you would spend $2,700, the stock moves up 3.10, you now have 3,010, it's about a 12% gain. Let's say you were willing to lose eight percent before selling your stock. Thus the stock goes down to 24.50. A 250 dollar loss before you sell. If you invested that 250 into the options at .25, you would get 10 contracts, you would make 800 dollars, or... it becomes worthless, and you lost exactly what you would have lost, had you invested in the stock and the stock went against you. That was a real trade I made, in NETL, that's still on going, I bought a hundred contracts, sold fifty, which made me a profit, and makes the rest of the trade, whether successful or not, free. I have a realized profit of fifteen hundred dollars in two days, with another 2,000 in contract value (the stock dropped to twenty nine and the contract became .40).
Getting Started in Options is a great book that will get you started in options. Another Getting Started book I would suggest would be Getting Started in Chart Patterns by Thomas N. Bulkowski, also I would suggest Trader Vic's two books, Stan Weinstein book, William O'Neil's books, Martin Zweig, and Nicolas Darvas, since they all focus on break outs, which, in the options world, is a cash cow if you know how to play it right. If you know what you're doing, you're willing to speculate on market conditions, Trend Following by Michael Covel can help with that, and you're willing to speculate with the fundementals and technical moves of a stock (William O'Neil will help with that), and understand how the world effects things (Trader Vic, and Martin Zweig will help you there), then you can not only trade options as an added investment, but as a job with great returns.
For my top eight Call Option picks, they're stocks I used to be long before deciding to trade options almost exclusively, look in the comment section if interested. Of course, I give warning, it's only my opinion.
|
|
Complete, thorough, but very verbose
Rating  (4)
Date: 2010-04-25
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I am an engineer by day, an aspiring options trader by night. Having read this book for the past week and finished it today, I have mixed feelings about it.
On one hand, I believe the author covered everything. He discusses the foundation of options, the terminology, a lot about the possible strategies, tax treatment, and even spends time on the fundamental and technical analysis of underlying equities. The diagrams are very helpful. I am very pleased with how thorough the book is.
On the other hand, I couldn't help but feel that the author feels that the more pages the book has, the better. All the content could be squeezed into two thirds of the pages without losing any value. In the first chapter the author states that as a call buyer, you acquire the right to buy 100 shares of stock at a fixed price per share. Hundreds of pages later, the author continues repeating this fact as if this is new information. The examples reiterate at least two dozen times that the premium is measured in hundreds of dollars.
I know that it is not easy to make options accessible to newbies, but sometimes the author goes overboard with repetitiveness. If an editor could go through and tighten the next edition, I believe this book would be an invaluable tutorial and later a reference to a wide audience.
|
|
SIMPLY UNDERSTOOD!!!
Rating (5)
Date: 2010-01-19
0 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
GETTING STARTED IN OPTIONS Getting Started in Options (Getting Started In.....) as an introductory guide to the potentially risky and complicated world of options trading; this book written by MICHAEL C THOMSETT makes learning the language and possibilities SIMPLY UNDERSTOOD!!! purchased this book after previous reading as permanent reference in my library of financial tools along with GETTING STARTED IN FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS Getting Started in Fundamental Analysis also titled by MICHAEL C THOMSETT as another well written financial reference source!!!
|
|
Good, choppy, somewhat out of date
Rating (3)
Date: 2009-10-30
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
The good part is that he covers all the basic and advanced option trades. He gives useful and good ideas about trading, and many warnings. However, the writing is choppy because he constantly inserts examples, sidebars and graphs which are not integrated into the flow of the text and are annoying. I don't get why he calls the exercise or strike price a 'striking price,' or why he insists on trades as whole-dollar amounts ($1.00, $2,00, etc.) when everyone trades in dollars and cents ($1.26, $3.71, etc.). The book is certainly worth the time and money to study, and as a reference.
|
|
Retail Price: $19.95
Amazon.com's Price:$3.00
That's 85% Off!
 |
|
|
|