Hedging Your Portfolio with Index Options

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Jim Graham)

Institutions and mutual funds are the biggest customers for index options. To manage large diversified stock portfolios, it is easier to purchase puts on an index or sector rather than doing hundreds of trades on each individual stock. Wh...

When Should you Exercise an Option Early?

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Jim Graham)

The variables used to come up with a “fair value” for a stock option are the price of the underlying stock, volatility, time, dividends, and interest rates. While the first three deservedly get most of the attention, since they have ...

The Big Three Economic Indicators

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Jim Graham)

Traders are always trying to understand the factors that cause the market to rise and fall. The truth is that there are a multitude of factors, and millions of investors make decisions that impact the market every day. Corporate earnings an...

Options Strategies and the Use of Options

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Jim Graham)

One of the great things about options is that you can use them for a very wide range of strategies, and each of these strategies has a different risk/reward profile. Some are high-risk, like the speculative buying of call and put options; others...

Options Expiration Cycles

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Jim Graham)

Deciding which stock option to trade based on your expectations for the underlying stock requires choosing an expiration month.  And the expiration month you choose can have a significant impact on the potential success of any option trade. ...

Growth Investing

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Jim Graham)

Investors that focus on fundamentals tend to have a bias towards value investing when looking for potential trades. Growth investing is another major school of investment theory that relies on analyzing the fundamentals. One way to understa...

The Beauty of Combinational Strategies

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Len Yates)

I have written about all the main option strategies and many of those articles have been about combinational strategies – trades involving two or more options simultaneously.   The reason I’ve sought to bring your attention to the ...

Buying Calls in Lieu of Stock

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Len Yates)

I'm a great believer in technology. I realize that these became overvalued in the year 2000. Too bad they lost half their value before it started to come out that they were having a business slowdown. They lost half their value again since then, a...

Does Your Child Know What a Credit Card Is?

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Anne Sparks)

From the early childhood on, we try to teach our children the basic knowledge for adult life – how to keep room in order, how to eat healthily, how to communicate with people. Modern life requires that parents should start teaching kids how to spen...

How long would you like your mortgage?

(Tue Oct 30th, 2007, by Kathy Shin)

Until now, you had heard about this subject plenty of times, but really didn't understand what all the fuss was about. In the earlier, the 30-year, rigid-evaluate mortgage was the banner picking for most homebuyers. Nowadays, however, lenders suggest...