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Monday, March 2, 2009

Using "thinkorswim" For Option Trading Beats Stock Trading Course

By Walter Fox

Stocks have been on a kind of wild ride for the past year, with volatility that no stock trading course could have prepared investors for. The up-and-down, whipsaw motion of the major indices has meant that good stocks have been hurt and bad stocks have been devastated.

Unlike the best stock trading courses, a stock option course will show you how to benefit from the down turns in the markets. You read that correctly- with the knowledge gained from taking an options trading course you can benefit when the market looses.

Using the two basic stock option methods will allow the options trader to benefit more with less risk of capital than the stock trader is able. The call options are the easiest to understand. To put it simply, the value of the call option goes up as the value of the stock goes up.

At their core, call options are coupons that give you the right, but not the obligation, to buy a stock at a certain price for a limited amount of time. In this way, you can trade call options for their inherent value, or you can buy them as a way to purchase your favorite stocks at a relative discount.

Call options are often referred to as 'surrogates' for stocks because you can benefit from the upward movement of a stock at a fraction of the price. However, the often overlooked profit player is a put option, which is also based on an underlying stock and increases in value when that stock goes down. You can also trade put options for the value they carry inherently, but they also afford you the right, but not the obligation, to sell a stock at a set price. That means you can sell a low-valued stock at a premium price.

In addition, put options can act as a kind of insurance to protect any stock that you do have. Let's say you have 100 shares of stock XYZ, which is trading at $10. If you purchase 1 put option contract at the $10 level, that means is if XYZ drops down to $5, your put options will afford you the opportunity to sell the stock for $10 a" even though it's trading for half of that.

While the most basic tenet of a stock trading course will tell you to 'buy low and sell high', day-to-day stock trading has lost any sort of rhyme or reason and there are few, if any, fundamental reasons for the huge intraday swings we are seeing. The fortunate thing is that this kind of frenetic atmosphere is when stock option strategies profit most.

Online training with a basic brokerage account will allow you to make terrific profits from put and call options trading that the stock trader would not realize. Options are not limited to individual stocks either as you are able to trade options on the major indices as well as exchange traded funds (ETFs). This translates to your being able to trade an entire sector or index with less capital. Do not limit yourself to trading just stocks in today's volatile market by taking a stock trading class; increase your opportunities by adding options trading to your portfolio today!

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