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Swope and Howell, Trading by Numbers

  
  Education
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The title of this book by Rick Swope and W. Shawn Howell is somewhat misleading. It’s not intuitively obvious, or at least it wasn’t to me, that Trading by Numbers: Scoring Strategies for Every Market (Wiley, 2012) is primarily about options.

But let’s start, as the authors do, with their trend and volatility scoring methods. The trend score has four components: market sentiment (the relationship between a long-term moving average and a short-term moving average and the position of price in relation to each moving average), stock sentiment (the same parameters as market sentiment), single candle structure (body length relative to closing price), and volume (OBV trend). The range is -10 to +10. Volatility scoring has three legs: historical market volatility, historical stock volatility, and expected market volatility. The range is 0 to +10.

Before moving on to the standard option strategies, the authors address risk management, which they wisely describe as nonnegotiable. Risk management again has three legs: risk/reward, concentration check, and position sizing. 

And, with chapter five (of sixteen), we’ve reached covered calls. The reader who has no experience with options will be lost. Even though the authors push all the right buttons (ITM, ATM, OTM strategies; the Greeks; position adjustments), they push the buttons almost as if they were playing a video game. Very fast.

Assuming that the reader is not new to the option market, what can he/she learn from this book? Let’s look very briefly at three strategies and see how they reflect three different market or individual stock conditions: a long call, a straddle/strangle, and an iron condor. Traditionally described, in the simplest of terms, the first is looking for a significant bullish directional move, the second anticipates a surge in volatility, and the third expects a rangebound market. (more…)

9 Trading Option Books from our Library

  
  Education
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Get Rich With Options While the publisher choose an aggressive title for this book it does lay out four good option trading strategies. Selling puts on stocks that you want to own at lower prices anyway, option credit spreads, selling covered calls or income on long term holdings, and my personal favorite: deep-in-the-money call options. Very few ever discuss the power of buying DITM call options where you control the full upside of a stock for less risk and with far less capital.

The Bible of Option Strategies This is the encyclopedia of option strategies covering everyone that I know of. You get a description of each strategy along with specific metrics for each one on the steps in creating it, the rationale to trade it, if it is net debit or credit, the effect of time decay on the strategy, appropriate time period, selecting the right stocks and options, risk profile, the Greeks, the advantages and disadvantages and how to best exit the trade. This book is meant as a reference book but I read it through cover to cover.

Trading Stock Options Complete reverse from the above book, this is like the Cliff’s Notes of complex trading strategies. The author shows how he trading real option trades for big profits and a few some smaller losses. He simplifies many strategies to make the understandable especially playing long strangles and straddles through earnings by betting on actual post earnings volatility being greater than the volatility that is priced in to the options through Vega.

Trading On Corporate Earnings This is a great book on how to best play holding through earnings announcements by using options instead of stock. (more…)

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