First and foremost, make the right decision regarding the underlying stock. The profit from options is closely related to the movement of the underlying stock. The trader should be aware that he has entered into a contract to trade with more or less 10,000 shares of the stock chosen and he will do well to learn to trade with multiples of one contract to minimize the losses likely to occur.

After you have mastered enough on the subject of options, you can easily engage in online options trading which is the most convenient way to carry on trade. But remember that answers to your frequently arising queries on options will remain unanswered if you don’t have adequate knowledge of margin accounts, premiums, strategies etc. It’s also necessary to have a contingency plan to escape huge losses. Also make sure your online dealings are with a fair and reputed broker so that you don’t end up paying huge amounts of fees.

Next, you need to educate yourself about ‘call options’ and ‘put options’ while mastering the options trade. The call option enables the trader to buy a stock at a predetermined price before the period of expiry to exercise this right. There is no obligation here though. The put option is just the reverse being the right of the trader to sell a specific stock at a set price before expiry. ‘Premium’ is of course the amount paid to the seller for the option. Exercise price or strike price is the above mentioned predetermined price for which you sell or buy the underlying asset.

You need to understand perfectly the risk factors associated with options. Be aware of the fact that this is an area where you can stand to lose your entire investment in a single shot in case the price of the underlying stock moves against your speculation. Options also carry an expiration date which implies that if your stock fails to regain its position before the expiry date then every penny invested disappears into thin air.

A seasoned options trader will wisely invest in calls and in puts too so that he spreads his investment to minimize his losses. No use in researching only the particular stocks in which you intend to invest, there are different factors which influence the shifts in market trends like politics, unemployment, budgets etc which you need to study in detail while you look out for trade options. Be methodical in your analysis, prepare a spreadsheet indicating performances of all your calls and puts and thus keep a good track of your earnings and losses.

You can easily lead the markets if you can crack the code for the trade options. To know more about option trading and its benefits, you can visit http://www.optionstradingbusiness.com

Writing options means we are sellers of an options contract, which can be risky under some circumstances, but not with covered calls. In fact, covered call writing is probably the most conservative options-writing strategy because the contract you write is backed by your ownership of the underlying stock. Let’s say you own 500 shares of a highly liquid blue chip stock like Microsoft. Microsoft isn’t very volatile and that makes it an ideal candidate for covered call writing. It’s a good idea to write calls on stocks that aren’t very volatile because we’re going to write out-of-the-money calls and collect some income in the form of a premium for doing so. Say Microsoft is trading at $23. We might write calls on the $25 strike for the next month’s contract. The risk here is that if the underlying stock rises above the strike price before expiration, the buyer of the call can call our stock away at $25, which is a discount to the market price. Now you see why you have to own the stock you’re writing covered calls on and why you want to select stocks that are range-bound. As a rule of thumb, you would write one call contract for every 100 shares of the underlying you own.

Another fairly conservative options strategy is the married put trade. Married puts are a lot like covered calls in that you already own the underlying stock and you’ll buy an amount of puts equivalent to the number shares you own. Here, you’ll be long on the puts, but since you own the underlying stock, the puts act as a hedge. In other words, they give you a way to make money if the stock declines.

There are several different options strategies known as spreads. One of the more basic ones is the bull call spread. In this trade, you buy calls at one strike price and then sell the same amount of calls at a higher strike price. So if you bought five Microsoft 25 calls, you might sell five Microsoft 27.50 or 30 calls. The contracts have to have the same expiration month and underlying security for the trade to be considered a bull call spread. This is a bullish strategy.

The bearish cousin of the bull call is the bear put spread. Here you’ll buy puts at one strike price and then sell the same amount of puts at a LOWER strike price. Both strategies limit gains, but they also limit losses.

As you can see, a lot of options strategies offer protection to investors. Another one of these trades is the protective collar. With a protective collar, you’ll purchase an out-of-the-money put option and write (or sell) an out-of-the-money call option on the same security. This strategy is used by investors that have already gotten substantial appreciation from the underlying security as a way of locking in profits.

Got a feeling that a stock is about to make a big move, but you’re not sure what way the move is going to go? That’s OK because you buy both a put and call with the same strike price and expiration on the same security. This is known as the long straddle and positions you perfectly to profit from a big move in the underlying, regardless of the direction.

A related strategy is the long strangle, but there’s a twist with this trade. With a long strangle, you’ll buy a put and a call on the same security with same expiration date, but with different strike prices. A strangle is usually a little cheaper than a straddle because you’ll be buying out-of-the-money contracts. And with both long straddles and strangles, your loss is limited to the cost paid to enter the trade.

The butterfly spread is an advanced options strategy that may seem confusing to the novice options investor. In a butterfly spread, we combine bullish and bearish spreads using three different strike prices. An example of a butterfly spread would include buying one put or call at the lowest or highest available strike price, then purchasing two of whatever we didn’t purchase in the first leg at higher or lower strike prices and then one final put or call at a lower of higher strike. Let’s try to make this easy to understand. Buy one call, buy two puts, then add another call. Voila, there’s your butterfly spread.

Another unique options strategy that is geared more to experienced options traders is the iron condor. The iron condor is risky and complex because you simultaneously hold a long and short position in two different strangles. This is the type of trade you need to research before randomly committing money to it.

And our final options trade that we think you ought to know is another butterfly. The iron butterfly allows investors to combine a long or short straddle with the purchase or sale of a strangle. With the iron butterfly we use both puts AND calls, not one or the other. Using out-of-the-money options is advisable to keep costs and risks to a minimum.