Trading Options to Win: Profitable Strategies and Tactics for Any Trader
$13.20
In this unique and engaging treatise on the art and science of speculation, expert S. A. Johnston combines the profitable elements of banking, bookmaking, and gambling-three other ways of making money with money-with trading, to provide readers with a fresh new approach to trading the market. Written by a trader for a trader, Trading Options to Win gives readers a framework for using logical analysis to uncover profitable opportunities that they would otherwise miss. Johnston develops a speculative method that traders can use to consistently find and manage profitable trades. He then backs his talk up by detailing three months worth of trades using his successful method. For investors looking to move beyond the realms of technical and fundamental analysis, Trading Options will be the guide of choice.
Introduction:
If you intend to trade options and win, you need a definable advantage. The nature of the advantage, whether historical, statistical, or any other, doesn’t really matter. What does matter is recognizing and seizing the advantage whenever you can.
In Trading Options to Win: Profitable Strategies and Tactics for Any Trader, S.A. (Stu) Johnston shares thirty years of trading experience to help improve your trading profitability in the options and futures markets. Unlike some books, which offer a single “sure-fire” system for turning a profit, Trading Options to Win examines a broad methodology of trading that puts the likelihood of profits on your side of the table.
Through thoughtful insights and detailed examples of actual and hypothetical trades, Johnston illustrates disciplined methods for selecting strategies to use and trades to enter, tactics to maintain your advantage once you’ve entered a trade, and organized methods that allow you to protect your capital when a trade doesn’t initially work in your favor.
Written in a lively, conversational style, this book looks at the ultimate necessity in trading the recognition, avoidance, and control of diverse risks and then shows how the careful use of options makes this task much easier.
Trading Options to Win also offers a thorough look at five main tactics of defense to use when trading options by themselves or options with assets, because there are far more ways to keep your capital where it belongs in your pocket than by simply exiting a temporarily unsuccessful trade.
After learning how to protect yourself in the options and futures markets, Trading Options to Win shows you, in detail, strategies designed to give you an advantage in the market, including:
- Profiting from knowing where a market is not likely to go
- Profiting no matter which direction a market moves
- Profiting when a market doesn’t move
- Profiting in long-lasting “dull” bear markets
- Profiting when the optimists of the world run amok
- Profiting when the optimists, inevitably, run out of capital
- And much more
If you want to improve your trading, and you already know the difference between a put and a call, and know what a premium, a striking price, and an expiration date are, then Trading Options to Win is the book for you.
Contents:
- Making Money with Money
- On the Trail of a Method: Risk, Leverage, and Markets
- Profitability 101: Expectation and Options
- Just the Facts, Ma’am: Avoiding Moonshine, Morons, and Myths
- No Hammer, No House: The Tools of the Trader
- Thomas More’s Revenge: A Strategy for All Seasons
- Apocalypse Never: The Uses of Defense
- Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something: The Straddle
- Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There: The Strangle
- Hi-Yo, Yogi! Riding the Bear
- The King of Strategies: The Martian Ratio-Spread
- Every Once in a While: The Picador
- Pay Me after Lunch: The Endplay
- Filling in the Cracks: Ideas, Understanding, and Winning
- APPENDIX A Studies of Historical Gross Movement in Selected Markets, 1990–2002
- APPENDIX B Distribution of Contract Highs and Lows in Selected Markets, 1980–2002
Trading Options to Win: Profitable Strategies and Tactics for Any Trader By S. A. Johnston pdf
| Author(s) | |
|---|---|
| Format | |
| Pages | 319 |
| Publication Year | 2003 |
12 reviews for Trading Options to Win: Profitable Strategies and Tactics for Any Trader
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Sergio Hampton (verified owner) –
gives real trades, real numbers. this is a genuine how to book.
Kallie Montoya (verified owner) –
Stu’s writing style and exceptional wisdom when it comes to the futures options markets is unparalleled.
Funny, witty, and filled with gobs of invaluable information, I keep this book on my trading desk at all times.
Jayda Hardin (verified owner) –
Great book for those interested in options. I would also recommend this book for anyone who is interested in investing/trading period. The chapter on making money with money is priceless in and of itself.
Nayeli Dunlap (verified owner) –
I read this book and must say it gives you a great grounding in options theory. A must read.
Ford Wall (verified owner) –
First, the problems. He takes awhile to get to his point. You need to get past his cute phrases and chatty style. Second, I use chapter and section headings to help me through a book. His headings a worse than useless. For example, one chapter heading is “Just the Facts, Ma’am”.
Getting past all of that, I found my efforts well rewarded. He truly comes up with very original insights into trading. He examines risk from a unique perspective. His ideas on option writing cannot be found in any other book I have seen.
For example, most traders use seasonality to find market trends. His chapter on using seasonality to predict non-trending, choppy markets (important for the option writer) is truly a classic. He sees, smells, and thinks about how the option writer can make money in the markets, and I have found no other book with such real world trading ideas.
If you sell options, this is a must read.
Hassan Travis (verified owner) –
Johnston approaches options trading in a very unique way.
You wont find his approach in any other book which I quite liked as most option books tend to be repetive.
It would be great to see another book on the subject by him.
Leona Velazquez (verified owner) –
I read this book with an interest in stock options. The author’s focus is almost entirely on the Futures and Commodities markets. That said, I learned a heck of a lot! It is somewhat advanced and he is comfortable with some advanced mathematical models, so not a beginner’s book, but a great read with lots of savvy information.
Drew Christensen (verified owner) –
Don’t know what book Edward Lovette read, but it’s pretty clear he didn’t read the entire book. This is an exceptional book and anyone who trades options would be taking the short end of the bet by missing it. Johnston makes his points easily, clearly, practically, and (unusual for a book on options, which are usually dry as dust) it’s very entertaining. Mainly, and again this is rare or nonexistent in the options books I’ve read, Johnston presents the background and the reasoning behind the trading strategies he’s talking about and shows the WHY of making profits in the markets and not just the what and the how. The strategies themselves are pretty interesting. Everybody knows about straddles and strangles, but how about a “Martian ratio-spread” or a “WOOM non-seasonal?” I’ve traded options for a long time and read a lot of books on options, yet I never even heard of these strategies, so there’s a lot of originality in this book, too. Any options trader will get a lot of good fresh ideas from “Trading Options To Win.” I just wish it had been longer, but it’s 5 stars anyway.
Quincy Finley (verified owner) –
Those favorable reviews are what persuaded me to buy the book. For me, the book was absolutely useless. The author takes forever to make his point and usually it’s not a very useful point when it’s made. The titles of each chapter and subchapter are also useless. Rather than just saying what each chapter is devoted to, he incorporates a phrase which the author apparently finds catchy. Finally, and I know some of you will find this unacceptable, I was not even able to finish the book. Mind you, I have been a very hard core student of the market for well over a year and have read many books, in addition to trading, practice trading, and attending seminars, but I eventually gave up about 2/3 of the way through when I realized (after about 2 months of trying to force myself through the book) that I was wasting my time, which is a greater annoyance than the money wasted on buying the book. Others’ opinions obviously differ from mine, but for me, this book was extremely annoying in its presentation, contained very very little on how to actually trade any given strategy (or how to defend it), and, as the other unfavorable reviewer noted, is about 90% trading psychology and 10% how-to.
Jovie Zimmerman (verified owner) –
This book is very good if you want to trade the futures market with options.
It’s slow at the beginning … you need to get through interesting but out-of-focus discussions, and then the strategies are presented.
The author only trades options on the commodity markets, and makes a strong case for it.
What I really like about this book is the trade defenses / adjustments.
To paraphrase the author :
“Look, I already know how to win; what I want to know is how not to lose. Consistent with this view, the examples of actual or hypothetical trades throughout the text are generally negative examples — demonstrating what to do if a trade goes awry, how to deal with unanticipated risk, and even, occasionally, how to turn a loss back into a profit. After all, if a trade goes well, it goes well, we bank the profit, and there’s little more to be said about it, right?”
This is really the added-value of the book.
On the minus side … I regret that all the info is fundamental : there are statistics, normal and lognormal distribution curves … BUT no charts !
It makes the examples somewhat difficult to follow (for example : the short strangle … without a graph of the underlying it’s very painful).
Another irritating thing is the writing style : it’s very familiar, slangy sometimes … English is not my native language and if the author tries (and manages !) to be funny, looking in the dictionary every page removes a lot of fun and reduces comprehension.
All in all, it’s still a fine book, with very good information on how to defend option trades.
Mazikee Poole (verified owner) –
Hello Folks,
One of the few trading books I have kept in my library. Most trading books are complete junk; they re-hash the obvious.
The book has many interesting techniques, including adjustments that don’t just apply to the Futures Options market. In fact, I don’t even trade futures options.
I give it a four stars because: a. I wish he was less verbose and b. I wish he gave many more examples, including stocks, along with charting.
Regards,
Aries Knox (verified owner) –
The book is written in a very informal way which is the style of the author (fine) but the gist of his trading strategy could have been explained much shorter. No graphs. The book could have been reduced to 30 pages max. He lulls the novice into trades which can break your neck. Although the way he thinks (trying to find an edge when setting up a trade) is correct the suggested strategies he likes the most are inherently short volatility and very risky. He also focuses mostly on commodity markets and I believe the edge that he found back then is gone by now. If you are serious about option trading and spreading then the must have books are: Option Market Making (Baird) and Charles Cottles Book “The hidden reality of options trading”. Dont buy this book! Those books have been written by battle proven market makers.