Saturday, April 26, 2014

Understanding Options and How You Can Trade Like A Pro

by Michael Sincere

by Sarah Potter

I’m reviewing these two books together because they cover a lot of the same material. Obviously, Sarah Potter’s book, Trade Like A Pro is a lot broader and focuses mainly on trading strategies, analysis, methodologies, charts, graphs, and the nitty gritty details of making regular, and hopefully profitable, trades. Michael Sincere, on the other hand, in his book focuses only on options: what they are, how they work, and how to use them to broaden one’s investment strategy. Although options are certainly a speculator’s game, they also have a role in the average investor’s portfolio, whereas everything in Trade Like a Pro is geared to the person who is going to do just that: trade.

I found Mr. Sincere’s book much more up my alley, both from the aspect of the types of trades and the prices of the examples he uses, to the step by step walk through of a typical (and not so typical) options trade. Ms. Potter, on the other hand, assumes you know a lot and are ready for some advanced topics and analysis, and she also assumes you have a large war chest to start with. (For example, Mr. Sincere’s typical options sample trade uses Boeing at $88, while Ms. Potter uses Mastercard at $550. Does it matter in the end? Not really, but I know that $50K trades in options are nowhere in my near future, whereas $9K probably is.) I've been buying and selling equities for 28 years but had never ventured into options. After reading Understanding Options, I opened my options account and made my first trade. It really was as simple as reading the book, following the instructions, and executing the trade. As for Trade Like a Pro, I gained valuable insight into trend analysis and found remarkably similar approaches in simple moving average usage that is close to what I already do (and have been doing for years).


Really, I think reading these books together is a good approach, as they have similarities and differences in investment strategies that allow the reader to creatively think about their own investments (or in some cases, gambles). I rate Mr. Sincere’s book slightly higher because it is much easier to read and understand and for his laser focus on this one topic, but that is not to say it is better than Ms. Potter’s, whose book is full of useful ideas, suggestions and strategies. In the end, reading one or both of these books is sure to help most anyone who invests or speculates regularly in equities markets.

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