Grow Your Stock Exchange with Futures and Options by Charlie Rubin

This week's featured book on options trading:

Grow Your Stock Exchange with Futures and Options: A Guide to Understanding These Financial Instruments
by Charlie Rubin
Wheatmark (July 2009)

From the publisher: Financial and commodity futures and options can greatly enhance and grow stock exchange activity. Likewise, these products improve the overall condition of a country's financial community and economy. The material in this book is both introductory and comprehensive, starting with the basics and expanding into the many practical and business applications for futures and options.

Growing Your Stock Exchange with Futures and Options illustrates how these exchange-traded financial instruments benefit all customers: speculators and hedgers, portfolio managers, corporations, farmers, food wholesalers, oil producers, and others who deal in buying or selling securities and other commodities. It also discusses the risks and concerns associated with these derivatives.

Put Option Strategies for Smarter Trading by Michael C. Thomsett

Put Option Strategies for Smarter Trading: How to Protect and Build Capital in Turbulent Markets
by Michael C. Thomsett
FT Press (December 2009)

From the publisher: Options traders most commonly focus on calls: the right to purchase stock if prices rise. The 2008 stock market crash demonstrated just how misguided this singular emphasis can be: thousands of investors suffered massive losses they could have avoided through the careful, defensive use of strategies based on puts instead of calls.

Now, for the first time, there's a comprehensive, balanced guide to using puts to create profits, protect stock positions, and hedge against all types of risk. Renowned expert Michael C. Thomsett, author of the #1 options best-seller Getting Started in Options, introduces powerful "defensive" strategies that are typically ignored or deemphasized in most other options books: indispensable techniques for any investor anticipating a market decline, now or in the future. Thomsett shows how to use long puts to ensure paper profits in stock or to offset losses, even when stocks decline steeply and quickly; how to apply puts in straddles and spreads, in multi-part strategies that prevent losses and hedge risks; how to identify opportunities to create cash flow by selling limited-risk naked puts to create cash flow, and much more. These defensive strategies balance out the "you can't lose" approach seen in all too many options books. What's more, Thomsett's clear writing style, complemented by dozens of easy-to-understand tables, graphics, and examples, makes it easy for any investor to apply these strategies successfully.

Also available: Put Option Strategies for Smarter Trading (Kindle edition). Learn more about the Amazon Kindle, a wireless reading device.

LEAPS Trading Strategies by Marty Kearney

This week's featured book on options trading:

LEAPS Trading Strategies: Powerful Techniques for Options Trading Success
by Marty Kearney
Marketplace Books (March 2009)

From the publisher: Investors are increasingly turning to LEAPS (Long-Term Equity AnticiPation Securities) to combine the advantages of options trading with the benefits and security of a longer time frame. Here, Marty Kearney of the Options Institute at the Chicago Board Options Exchange examines the wide range of practical and effective strategies for managing LEAPS, and shows you how to match these strategies to your own risk profile.

Learn how to tailor your options program using LEAPS and devise key strategies to improve profitability, protect paper profits, and avoid losses in long stock positions.

 • Use LEAPS to produce monthly income,
 • Identify key elements in determining LEAPS prices,
 • Master LEAPS symbols and expiration cycles,
 • Insure your portfolio against market pullbacks,
 • Manage year-end tax consequences,
 • Establish security positions with little risk.

Providing advanced technical insight, Kearney walks you through the inner workings of LEAPS and shows you compelling strategies for incorporating them into your overall approach to market. With the Online Video Access included, you'll have everything you need to begin profiting with LEAPS.

Trade Like a Pro: 15 High-Profit Trading Strategies by Nobel DraKoln

This week's featured book on options trading:

Trade Like a Pro: 15 High-Profit Trading Strategies
by Nobel DraKoln
Wiley (March 2009)

From the publisher: Financial markets have changed dramatically over the last few years, but there are still opportunities available within them. And while there are no shortcuts to trading success, you can improve your chances if you learn how to Trade Like a Pro. Nobody understands this better than author Noble DraKoln, and with this timely guide, he'll help you look at trading through the eyes of a professional and show you how to carve out your own path in the markets with a set of strategies that will allow you to grow and preserve capital.

Written with the serious trader in mind, this book skillfully shows you how to: construct trades that carefully incorporate spot, futures, and options together; diminish your risk profile and maximize profit potential; determine the risk/reward of staying in a trade; and much more.

Divided into three comprehensive parts, this reliable resource opens with a detailed discussion of what it takes to transition from the mindset of a retail trader to that of a professional trader. You'll gain valuable insights into the motivation, financial savvy, and psychological differences between professional and retail traders, and become well equipped to deal with today's dynamic markets. After this informative introduction, Parts Two and Three of Trade Like a Pro outline fifteen different high-profit, low-risk trading strategies. Nine basic strategies, which were initially introduced in DraKoln's previous book, Winning the Trading Game, are now analyzed in more depth, and six advanced risk management strategies—meant to build upon the knowledge that you gain here—are also covered.

Included among the strategies are:

 • Using options as a stop or as a risk management tool
 • Creating synthetic options to minimize transaction costs
 • Using straddles and strangles to trade news events
 • Using collars to create limited loss/defined profit scenarios
 • Using spreads to take advantage of seasonal tendencies

Along the way, you'll also learn how to combine certain strategies to improve your odds of success.

Trading is a difficult endeavor and requires a set plan built around proven strategies, discipline, and intelligent decisions. With Trade Like a Pro as your guide, you'll quickly discover how to create a plan that will allow you to manage risk and capture profits in almost any market.

Also available: Trade Like a Pro (Kindle edition). Learn more about the Amazon Kindle, a wireless reading device.