"SELL TATAMOTORS FUTURE BELOW 336 TGT 334.5/332.2 SL 338.9"
"BUY NIFTY 7500 CALL@ 154 TGT 179/194 SL 128"
Whether you are a trader or an investor, your
objective is to make money. And your secondary objective is to do so with the
minimum acceptable level of risk.
One of the major difficulties for new option
traders arises because they do not really understanding how to use options to
accomplish their financial goals. Sure, they all know
that buying something now and selling it later at a higher price is the
path to profits.
But that is not
good enough for option traders because option prices do not always behave as
expected.
For example, experienced stock traders do not
always buy stock. Sometimes they know sell short hoping to profit when the
stock price declines. Too many novice option traders do not consider the
concept of selling options (hedged to limit risk), rather than buying them.
Options
are very special investment tools and there is far more a trader can do than
simply buy and sell individual
options. Options have characteristics that are not available elsewhere in
the investment universe. For example, there is a set of mathematical tools
("the Greeks") that
traders use to measure risk. If you don't grasp just how important that is,
think about this:
If
you can measure risk
(i.e. maximum gain or loss) for a given position, then you can manage risk. Translation: Traders can
avoid nasty surprises by knowing how much money can be lost when the worst-case
scenario occurs.
Similarly, traders must know the potential reward for any position in order to
determine whether seeking that potential reward is worth the risk required.
For
example, a few factors that option traders use to gauge
risk/reward potential:
·
Holding
a position for a specific period of time. Unlike stock, all options lose value
as time passes. The Greek letter "Theta"
is used to describe how the passage of one day affects the value of an option.
·
Delta measures
how a price change -- either higher or lower -- for underlying stock
or index affects the price of an option.
·
Continued
price change. As a stock continues to move in one direction, the rate at which
profits or losses accumulates changes. That is another way of saying that the
option Delta is not constant, but changes. The Greek, Gamma describes the rate at which Delta
changes.
This is very different for stock (no matter the stock price, the value of one
share of stock always changes by $1 when the stock price changes by
$1) and the concept is something with which a new option trader must be
comfortable.
·
A
changing volatility environment. When trading stock, a more volatile market
translates into larger daily price changes for stocks. In the options world,
changing volatility plays a large role in the pricing of the options. Vega measure how much the price
of an option changes when estimated volatility changes.