Options are frequently used in hedging.
A hedge is an investment made to offset the risk incurred by entering another investment. Ironically, the basic idea is to bet against oneself, in a way.
Speculate that the market price will rise in the future and buy a call today. (A call is an option that confers the right [...]

Options price listings vary in appearance from site to site, but most will contain the following basic information. Here’s a breakdown of what they list and what it means.
Shown below is one line from such a chart:
GOOG
C Jun 400 27.80 27.90 27.85 .05 138 3
GOOG (above the line) indicates the company’s stock symbol, in this [...]

Why do options offer any advantage over trading stocks? They’re riskier, since they expire within a certain amount of time and their values are more complicated to assess.
Since they expire the investor has to make a choice within a relatively short time frame. (Even LEAPs - Long-term Equity AnticiPation Securities - are generally written for [...]

You often see the phrase ‘options and futures’, as if the two were financial Siamese twins. But, though similar, there are important differences the savvy investor should keep in mind.
Both are so-called derivatives, since they have no independent worth as an asset, but derive their value from the instrument they are related to. However, there [...]

There are more kinds of risk than there are investments, since every instrument carries several kinds. But risk isn’t inherently bad. Without it there’d be fewer opportunities for profit.
The fundamental risk, of course, is price uncertainty. No one knows for sure whether GOOG (the symbol for Google stock) will be higher tomorrow or lower.
Options, like [...]

There exist today an array of charts, patterns and statistical analyses large enough to please even a Medieval numerologist. Though it often looks and reads much like mathematical tea-leaf reading, most of the commonly used tools are based on serious empirical studies of the markets.
The best way to explain what technical analysis is may be [...]

We all know that saving for retirement is a good thing. The knowledge that a penny saved is a penny earned has been around since at least the time of Benjamin Franklin. Albert Einstein even got into the game by his pronouncement that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. What Einstein himself [...]

Options trading can become very complicated very quickly. There are LEAPS (long-term contracts), choosers, barriers, compounds (exotics) and a host of technical parameters to measure volatility and predict price movements.
Thankfully, some of these complications can be simplified into a number of simpler trading strategies. Most revolve around using the fact that options have a contractually [...]

Stock and Bond trading strategies run the gamut from the simple ‘buy and hold forever’ to the most advanced use of technical analysis. Options trading has a similar spectrum.
Options are a contract conferring the right to buy (a call option) or sell (a put option) some underlying instrument, such as a stock or bond, at [...]

There are multiple ways to reduce your total (and monthly) debt load, some less painful than others.
The obvious one, of course, is to simply pay down your debts. That can be difficult, and for some it may seem hopeless. But there is one method that has been employed by many with great success: the snowball [...]