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This article will give you information on six of the best options trading courses.
Trading stock options is an attractive option for many investors. The primary advantage that option trading offers is the ability to invest in a stock with very little capital. An investor can purchase an option on 100 shares of a stock for as little as $5 or $10 and potentially realize substantial profit from the underlying stock’s price movement, when buying 100 shares of the stock outright might cost thousands of dollars. That fact alone makes options very attractive to small or beginning investors who simply don’t have a lot of investment capital to work with.
Additionally, only investing a small amount of money means only risking a small amount of money. Therefore, even investors with plenty of trading capital may prefer the limited, clearly defined risk that comes with buying options. For example, if you purchase an option for $50, then that $50 is your total risk on the trade. In contrast, you would have much larger risk exposure if you invested in 100 shares of the underlying stock.
And although most stock options end up expiring with no value, it is possible for an option investor to generate an extremely high percentage return on investment. This makes options a good vehicle for making money in the stock market.
Investors can go either long (buying) or short (selling) a stock using options. An investor can take a long position in a stock by either buying a call option or short selling a put option. A short position in a stock can be implemented with either the purchase of a put option or the short sale of a call option.
How to Choose the Best Options Trading Course
There are many options trading courses to choose from, just as there are many stock trading courses available. And like learning to trade stocks or any other financial asset, investors need to take the necessary time to learn options trading and the many different option trading strategies that can be employed in the stock market.
The best options trading courses provide a comprehensive education in trading options that will help an investor feel comfortable and confident in trading options.
What is the best options trading course for you? – That will depend on your existing level of knowledge and experience as a stock market investor. You might just be looking to learn basic options trading strategies simply as a means of using options as a trading vehicle. Or you may already know the basics, in which case you might be more focused on which options trading strategies actually generate the most potential profit.
Other considerations are the cost of the options course and how well it fits with your schedule. (Fortunately, most online options trading courses allow an investor to proceed through the course at their own pace, so they can pick the times they devote to studying it.)
A good options trading course will be taught by a knowledgeable expert investor and will provide a thorough options trading education. It’s a good idea to look for online reviews from investors who have already taken the course. If other investors are well satisfied with what the course taught them, that increases the odds that you will find the course satisfying, too.
Best Options Trading Courses
Following is a description of six of the best options trading courses currently available online. All six are offered by well-respected financial information and education websites
Mindful Trader – Best Course for Real Profit Potential
Mindful Trader is run by one guy, Eric Ferguson. He’s a legitimately nice and caring person, which is a breath of fresh air in this industry. (And a bonus is that he’s so fast at responding to emails!)
Eric did years of research on stock market price tendencies. This is the key to his ability to know which options trading opportunities have the best odds of success. He knows from history that his trading strategy has historical odds in its favor.
That’s a big difference from most other options trading courses that simply teach you how to trade options but don’t teach you how to make money trading options. It’s a more data-driven approach to trading than flying by the seat of the pants.
He doesn’t teach complex options trading strategies. He keeps it really simple and says there’s no need for anything complex. He only buys call options.
In his service, Ferguson teaches the basics about what options are and how they work. He also teaches his actual trading strategy so that you learn how to use options to make money.
So you won’t learn about any exotic butterfly options strategies from Mindful Trader. But maybe that’s for the better. If you can make money in the long term by keeping it simple, then why try to take on anything more complicated?
What we love most about Mindful Trader, aside from the fact that there’s so much intelligence that’s gone into his trade decisions, is that this guy is just totally transparent and honest.
Benzinga Options School – Best Comprehensive Options Education
Benzinga.com is a financial market information website that provides daily financial news and stock market analysis to both professional institutional traders and individual retail investors. Many investors subscribe to its newsfeed as a matter of course. In addition to providing up to the minute stock market news, analysis, and commentary, Benzinga also offers excellent stock trading educational resources, including the Benzinga Option School.
The Benzinga Option School provides live online, college-style classes, Monday through Friday. The online classes feature real-time market examples of options trades, so students can see exactly how an options trading strategy works. In addition to the daily classes, there’s a live trading chat room where students can continue to watch live options trading and learn more.
If you have a question, you can set up an appointment to talk with a true options expert, a former Wall Street broker with more than 20 years of experience in trading options. There are also dozens of previous online options trading sessions archived that students can view at their leisure.
Enrolling in the Benzinga Option School also gives students access to the Benzinga Pro news streaming platform, which provides a wealth of helpful stock investing tools, including Benzinga’s exclusive stock scanner, daily trading signals, and market sentiment indicators.
Udemy Options Trading Basics – Best Course for Beginners
Udemy is a well known and well respected education website for learning just about anything, including how to trade options. The Udemy Options Trading Basics course is actually a collection of several options courses. Therefore, it provides a good comprehensive options trading education that can take even a complete novice from being an options beginner to being a knowledgeable options trader. The separate educational modules contained in the course are as follows:
- Introduction to Call Options and Put Options
- Introduction to Time Decay, Implied Volatility, and Option Greeks
- Beginner Strategies for Buying/Selling Options
- Options Market Structure, Strategy Box, and Case Studies
- Adjustments for Single Options
- Using Combination Stock and Options Strategies
The Udemy options basics course offers more than 10 hours of video instruction that students can access on demand, so an investor can easily fit taking the course into their free time. In addition to the video education material provided, the course also provides students with several downloadable options trading resources.
The course is taught by Hari Swaminathan, the founder of OptionTiger, which is an option mentoring company. Swaminathan has developed several proprietary options trading strategies on his own.
The very affordable Udemy Options Trading Basics Course has excellent ratings from former students, with an average score of 4.5 out of 5. Additional instruction in options trading is available at Udemy and at the OptionTiger website.
Born to Sell – Best for Learning to Sell Options
Born to Sell is a website that primarily offers an option trading service rather than a full options trading course. Founded in 2005 by a professional market analyst and options trader, the website provides specific covered call options trade suggestions.
A covered call option strategy involves buying 100 shares of the underlying stock and then selling a call option with a strike price above the stock’s current market price. With a covered call trading strategy, the ideal outcome is realized when the stock’s price moves higher, but never as high as the call option’s strike price prior to the option’s expiration. When that happens, an investor pockets a double profit with the gains made from holding the underlying stock, along with the money received for selling the call option.
Born to Sell does provide a free 12,000-word “Options Trading 101” guide for beginners, but its primary business is focused on selling subscriptions to its covered call options trading software. The software provides several tools designed to help investors spot promising opportunities to implement a covered call trade.
First, it offers a market scanner that can run through literally hundreds of thousands of covered call trading opportunities to help investors spot the best ones. Along that line, the software maintains a continually updated list of what it discerns to be the “Top 10 Covered Calls” for an investor to consider.
Born to Sell offers additional options trading courses on other specific option trading strategies, free of charge, but its covered call software service is rather expensive at $500 per year, or $700 per year if an investor opts to pay monthly. Investors can take advantage of a brief free trial period before deciding if they want to subscribe to the software service.
Born to Sell subscriber comments give the service a top five-star rating.
Black Box Stocks – Best Options Course with Chat Room
Black Box Stocks is a website that offers educational services and trading tools for both stock trading and stock option trading. For comprehensive training in trading options, ongoing education, and real-time option trading assistance, Black Box Stocks offers a highly valuable service.
The bulk of the training, which offers a daily online option trading chat room moderated by an option trading expert, new live videos and an archive of previously recorded videos, and multiple option trading strategies and tools, all costs less than $100. And investors have the option to first sign up for a totally free, three-hour beginner options trading course to get an idea of whether they think they’ll find the full Black Box options course a worthwhile investment of their time and money.
The option trading instruction includes specific information on trading options with a small trading account and on how to select the most promising option strike prices and expiration dates. The course is taught by a veteran options trading expert who is also the moderator of the daily trading chat room.
The Black Box course, in addition to providing a solid options trading education, also offers investors complete instruction on how the use Black Box’s trading system and trading tools. The long list of trading tools provided includes the daily online chat room, proprietary stock scanners, sophisticated charting tools, and multiple options trade alerts throughout each trading day.
Option Alpha – Best Comprehensive Options Course (Runner Up)
The long list of options trading courses available at the Option Alpha website have one characteristic that’s hard to beat – the courses are all free. Option Alpha offers a total of 12 options trading courses that are organized into Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced categories. All of the courses, each of which contain multiple videos, are free of charge and available on demand for a student to work through at their own pace.
The Option Alpha courses start with the most fundamental “Options Basics” and go all the way to options trading strategies and complete “Portfolio Management”. The 20-lesson initial “Options Basics” course is a very thorough one and does a particularly good job of providing students with a step-by-step understanding of stock options, how they work, and how an investor can trade them.
With the Option Alpha Options Courses, “free” doesn’t mean less valuable. The courses were created by Kirk Du Plessis, who is a former investment banker and market analyst. Du Plessis’ expertise in options trading is strong enough to convince several hedge funds to hire him as a consultant on options trading strategies.
Summary
Learning to trade options is a valuable skill to add to your investing arsenal. There are plenty of excellent online options trading courses available that can help investors broaden their investing skills and take advantage of additional stock trading opportunities. The five best options trading courses reviewed here present a variety in terms of the specific options trading education resources that they offer.
Before deciding on an options trading course, it’s a good idea to compare several courses to see how they match up in regard to content, format, and pricing. The best courses are those that offer a thorough options trading education, that you can take at your own pace, that offer plenty of real-time options trading examples, and that don’t strain your budget.
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