The Options Edge:  Winning the Volatility Game with Options On Futures
Learn how the options market really works--and improve your odds of winning! As more and more "sophisticated" trading models are pressed into service to unravel the mysteries of market action, information overload makes trading markets progressively more unstable. Nowhere is this truer than in the option pits of the large futures exchanges, where traders struggle to put a price on uncertainty under conditions of great underlying price volatility--often using formulae of dubious value. In The Options Edge, professional commodities trader and researcher Bill Gallacher stands up and shouts, "Enough!" This extraordinarily practical book dowplays complex formulae and technical abstractions to explain option pricing form an empirical perspective, using an extensive futures and options database developed and analyzed during the years 1996 and 1997. Futures options traders needing down-to-earth answers to complex questions can look to The Options Edge for: a thought-provoking discussion and critique of the Black-Scholes option pricing formulas, and presentation of a much simpler and sounder alternative; identification of the at-the-money straddle price as the only true basis for estimating implied volatility of a commodity futures contract--and a fast and accurate way of calculating this number; historical volatility profiles for all the actively traded futures contracts; understanding of how one of the world's largest hedge funds foundered through its misapplication of the Black-Scholes formula. Profitably trade options on futures--simply, consistently, and without excessive reliance on algebra and complex statistical formulae--with Bill Gallacher's commonsense The Options Edge.