Beginner course
Options trading
What the contracts actually are, and where the money really comes from
A ground-up track through options: the four positions, what you owe versus what you own, how income strategies really earn, and the honest downside of each. Built for someone who has opened an options chain, found a wall of numbers, and closed it again.
Course agenda
- Calls, puts, and the four positions — rights versus obligations
- Reading an options chain without being overwhelmed
- The Greeks, in the order they actually matter
- Income strategies: cash-secured puts and covered calls
- Intrinsic versus extrinsic value — what you can actually harvest
- Risk, assignment, and the ways each position goes wrong
By the end, you should be able to
- Explain any options position in terms of what you owe and what you own
- Read a chain and know which numbers change your decision
- Say what a strategy earns, what it caps, and what it risks
Chapters
Chapters are on their way
Each chapter is published here once it’s written up, so this list grows as the course runs. The reading below is a good place to start in the meantime.
Recommended reading
Written guides and calculators that cover this ground already.
- Calls and puts, explained: a beginner's guide to buying and selling optionsWhat calls and puts actually are, who's on each side of the trade, where the money flows, and the four positions that make up every options strategy — written for someone who has never traded an option before.
- The Wheel: a foundations guide to selling options for incomeWhat calls and puts actually are, how the Wheel strategy generates income, and where premium selling really earns — a careful look at the math behind options income.
- Technical analysis from first principles: a beginner's complete guideA thousand patterns have a thousand names — and every one of them is a footnote to a single tug-of-war between buyers and sellers. Candlesticks, chart patterns, support and resistance, moving averages, Bollinger Bands, MACD, and multi-time-frame analysis, explained from the ground up.
Educational only, not financial advice. These write-ups explain how instruments and strategies work. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and any figures are illustrative teaching examples rather than live quotes.