The vast majority of retail stock traders in the stock market keep away from trading in stock derivatives such as Options, believing it to be something that is too complex and too risky. Most of the few who venture out into this terrain with half-baked knowledge usually end in substantial losses over the long term because they simply do not know the safe strategies that one needs to deploy in this space and give up after a while. If you are somebody who has shied away from Options Trading in the past thinking it is beyond comprehension or because you always ended losing money, this is the right book for you.This book is for every person who wants to venture out into Options Trading to earn a steady part-time income with minimal risk.Here's what you get to learn from this book: What stock options are in simple terms! The various types of options and the common terms used in options trading. The underlying principles of options trading using easily-understandable scenarios. Insights into why anyone should trade in options Basic mistakes made by newcomers and how to avoid them. 6 great strategies you can use to consistently make profits while controlling your risk exposure Case studies illustrating the working of each strategy. Note: As an added bonus, this book also gives you access to worksheets you can use to calculate the potential returns and risk exposure for any strategic trade you want to get into or to even just carry out paper-trades! This book adopts an unsophisticated approach to teach options trading to just about anybody and therefore, if you are looking for a place to start learning about options trading and how to earn off it, look no further!

    Changes in the fifth edition include: A new chapter on credit derivatives (Chapter 21). New! Business Snapshots highlight real-world situations and relevant issues. The first six chapters have been -reorganized to better meet the needs of students and .instructors. A new release of the Excel-based software, DerivaGem, is included with each text. A useful Solutions Manual/Study Guide, which includes the worked-out answers to the "Questions and Problems" sections of each chapter, can be purchased separately (ISBN: 0-13-144570-7).

    His chief strengths are his uncanny ability to identify undervalued companies and his farsighted reading of the market trends. In this volume, Jim Slater makes available to the investor - whether the owner of only a few shares or an experienced investment manager with a large portfolio - the secret of his success. Central to his strategy is The Zulu Principle, the benefits of homing in on a relatively narrow area. Deftly blending anecdote and analysis, Jim Slater gives valuable selective criteria for buying dynamic growth shares, turnarounds, cyclicals, shells and leading shares. He covers many other vitally relevant aspects of investment such as creative accounting, portfolio management, overseas markets and the investor's relationship with their broker. From The Zulu Principle you can learn exactly when to buy shares and, even more important, when to see - in essence, how to make extraordinary profits from ordinary shares.

    In The Little Book of Big Profits from Small Stocks, small stock expert Hilary Kramer looks for stocks with fifty to two hundred percent upside potential!From drug stocks that may have been punished because an FDA approval failed to materialize when Wall Street expected it to, to the overly zealous selling off of Ford, there are many great low-priced stock opportunities. In this Little Book you'll learn:How to identify the low cost stocks that have the potential to yield big profits The most important secret to making money in stock investing Plus, you'll gain instant access to a website with educational videos, interactive tools and stock recommendations The Little Book of Big Profits from Small Stocks explains Kramer's methodology and gives you the ability to analyze the opportunities to pick your own winners.

    But often, a company's published accounts offer clues to impending disaster, providing you know where to look. Through the forensic examination of more than 20 recent stock market disasters, Tim Steer reveals how companies hide or disguise worrying facts about the robustness of their business. In his lively style, he looks at the themes that underlie the ways companies hide the truth and he stresses that in an assessment of a company's accounts, investors should always bear in mind that the only fact is cash; everything else - profit, assets, etc - is a matter of opinion. Full of invaluable lessons for investors, the book concludes with some trenchant observations on what is wrong in the worlds of investment, audit and financial regulation, and what changes should be introduced.

    If you have not yet bought the original copy, make sure to purchase it before buying this unofficial summary from aBookaDay. SPECIAL OFFER $2.99 (Regularly priced: $3.99) OVERVIEW This review of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis provides a chapter by chapter detailed summary followed by an analysis and critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. The main theme explored in the book is how corruption and greed in Wall Street caused the crash of the subprime mortgage market in 2008. Despite being completely preventable, the big firms in Wall Street chose to ignore the oncoming fall in favor of making money. Michael Lewis introduces characters—men outside of the Wall Street machine—who foresaw the crisis and, through several different techniques, were able to predict how and when the market would fall. Lewis portrays these men—Steve Eisman, Mike Burry, Charlie Ledley, and Jamie Mai—as the underdogs, who were able to understand and act upon the obvious weaknesses in the subprime market. Lewis’s overall point is to demonstrate how the Wall Street firms were manipulating the market. They used loans to cash in on the desperation of middle-to-lower class Americans, and then ultimately relied on the government to bail them out when the loans were defaulted. Using anecdotes and interviews from the men who were involved first-hand, the author makes the case that Wall Street, and how they conducted business in regards to the subprime mortgage market, is truly corrupt beyond repair, and the men he profiles in this novel were trying to make the best out of a bad situation. By having the words from the sources themselves, this demonstrates Lewis’s search for the truth behind what actually happened. Ultimately, we as an audience can not be sure if the intentions of these underdogs were truly good, but Lewis does an admirable job presenting as many sides to the story as possible. The central thesis of the work is that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused by Wall Street firms pushing fraudulent loans upon middle-to-lower class Americans that they would essentially not be able to afford. Several people outside of Wall Street were able to predict a crash in the market when these loans would be defaulted on, and bought insurance to bet against the market (essentially, buying short). Over a time period from roughly 2005-2008, the market crashed and huge banks and firms lost billions of dollars, filed for bankruptcy, or were bailed out by the government. These men, the characters of Lewis’s novel, were able to bet against the loans and made huge amounts of money, but it was not quite an easy journey. Michael Lewis is a non-fiction author and financial journalist. He has written several novels—notably Liar’s Poker in 1989, Moneyball in 2003, and The Blind Side in 2006. Born in New Orleans, he attended Princeton University, receiving a BA degree in Art History. After attending London School of Economics and receiving his masters there, he was hired by Salomon Brothers where he experienced much about what he wrote about in Liar’s Poker. He is currently married, with three children and lives in Berkeley, California. SUMMARY PROLOGUE: POLTERGEIST Michael Lewis begins his tale of the remarkable—and strange—men who predicted the immense fall of the housing market by immediately exposing himself as the exact opposite type of person from them. He explains to the reader that he has no background in accounting, business, or money managing.

    Using real-world examples and simple language, it lucidly illustrates what derivatives are and why they are so powerful. This second edition of "All About Derivatives" provides a rock-solid foundation on: The most common contracts available to you in today's marketKey concepts such as cost of carry, settlement, valuation, and payoffProven methods for establishing fair valueHow leverage can work for you--and against youThe various derivative contracts traded today, including forwards, futures, swaps, and optionsPricing methods and mathematics for determining fair valueHedging strategies for managing and reducing different types of riskINCLUDES A BRAND-NEW CHAPTER ON THE ROLEDERIVATIVES PLAYED IN THE 2008 FINANCIAL MELTDOWN

    Essentially, you make an initial guess, and then get more data to improve it. Bayes Theorem, or Bayes Rule, has a ton of real world applications, from estimating your risk of a heart attack to making recommendations on Netflix But It Isn't That Complicated This book is a short introduction to Bayes Theorem. It is only 15 pages long, and is intended to show you how Bayes Theorem works as quickly as possible. The examples are intentionally kept simple to focus solely on Bayes Theorem without requiring that the reader know complicated probability distributions. If you want to learn the basics of Bayes Theorem as quickly as possible, with some easy to duplicate examples, this is a good book for you.

    

    By way of background, a family office is a company, or group of people, who manage the wealth a family has gained over generations. The term 'family office' has an element of cachet, and even mystique, because it is usually associated with the mega-wealthy. However, practically speaking, virtually any family that manages its investments—independent of the size of the investment pool—could be considered a family office. The difference is mainly semantic. DIY Financial Advisor outlines a step-by-step process through which investors can take control of their hard-earned wealth and manage their own family office. Our research indicates that what matters in investing are minimizing psychology traps and managing fees and taxes. These simple concepts apply to all families, not just the ultra-wealthy. But can—or should—we be managing our own wealth? Our natural inclination is to succumb to the challenge of portfolio management and let an 'expert' deal with the problem. For a variety of reasons we discuss in this book, we should resist the gut reaction to hire experts. We suggest that investors maintain direct control, or at least a thorough understanding, of how their hard-earned wealth is managed. Our book is meant to be an educational journey that slowly builds confidence in one's own ability to manage a portfolio. We end our book with a potential solution that could be applicable to a wide-variety of investors, from the ultra-high net worth to middle class individuals, all of whom are focused on similar goals of preserving and growing their capital over time. DIY Financial Advisor is a unique resource. This book is the only comprehensive guide to implementing simple quantitative models that can beat the experts. And it comes at the perfect time, as the investment industry is undergoing a significant shift due in part to the use of automated investment strategies that do not require a financial advisor's involvement. DIY Financial Advisor is an essential text that guides you in making your money work for you—not for someone else!

    No confusing jargon. No unnecessary mumbo-jumbo. Just clear, easy-to-understand explanations of more than 40 of the most popular option strategies broken down into a play-by-play format including: Play Name: Long Call, Short Call Spread, Iron Condor, etc. The Setup: The goals and reasons to run each play Who Should Run It: Rookies, Veterans or All-Stars, based on degree of difficulty When To Run It: Describes each play as bullish, bearish or neutral The Strategy: A detailed overview of each strategy, their risks and the specific costs associated with multi-leg strategies. description For the first-time option trader The Options Playbook features a "Rookie's Corner," addressing the basic definitions and concepts you need to understand this market, tips to avoid common beginner's mistakes, and suggested strategies to "get your feet wet." For more experienced option traders, an expanded section on implied volatility explains how this handy variable can be used to find the potential range of the stock over the options life. A detailed section on pricing variables (Greeks) helps you understand how an option's price is affected by changes in market conditions. You will also learn how time decay and a change in implied volatility can affect your trade after it's in place and how to recover if things don't go according to plan. The Options Playbook features Options Guy Tips from TradeKing Senior Analyst Brian Overby. Like any good coach, Overby's handy insights help you put theory into successful real-world trading. This expanded 2nd edition includes 10 new plays and 56 new pages of handy content describing a brief history of options, five common mistakes options traders make and how to avoid them, an expanded glossary, how to manage option positions by rolling to a different month and strike, to explaining the difference between index and stock options, managing early exercise and assignment and how to calculate position delta and use it to manage overall position risk of a multi-leg option strategy. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. It is possible to lose more money than invested. Before making any investment decisions, please read Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options that accompanies The Options Playbook and available at: tradeking.com/ODD. (c) 2015 TradeKing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Securities offered through TradeKing, LLC, member FINRA and SIPC.

    Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein explains not just how the fund made and lost its money but also how the personalities of Long-Term’s partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the culture of Wall Street itself contributed to both their rise and their fall.When it was founded in 1993, Long-Term was hailed as the most impressive hedge fund in history. But after four years in which the firm dazzled Wall Street as a $100 billion moneymaking juggernaut, it suddenly suffered catastrophic losses that jeopardized not only the biggest banks on Wall Street but the stability of the financial system itself. The dramatic story of Long-Term’s fall is now a chilling harbinger of the crisis that would strike all of Wall Street, from Lehman Brothers to AIG, a decade later. In his new Afterword, Lowenstein shows that LTCM’s implosion should be seen not as a one-off drama but as a template for market meltdowns in an age of instability—and as a wake-up call that Wall Street and government alike tragically ignored.

     They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant nothing to them.  They were accustomed to risking billions.     At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric, whip-smart whiz kid who’d studied theoretical mathematics at Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT…when he wasn’t playing his keyboard for morning commuters on the New York subway.  With him was Ken Griffin, who as an undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of the worst bear markets of all time.  Now he was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money machines on earth. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as famous for his computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein, chess life-master and king of the credit default swap, who while juggling $30 billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank found time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT card-counting team.     On that night in 2006, these four men and their cohorts were the new kings of Wall Street.  Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a  new breed, the quants.  Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz --technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers-- had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino.  The quants believed that a dizzying, indecipherable-to-mere-mortals cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets.  And they helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse.     Few realized that night, though, that in creating this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.     Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside story of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of their net worth vaporize – and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so fast.  Had their years of success been dumb luck, fool’s gold, a good run that could come to an end on any given day?  What if The Truth they sought -- the secret of the markets -- wasn’t knowable? Worse, what if there wasn’t any Truth?   In The Quants, Scott Patterson tells the story not just of these men, but of Jim Simons, the reclusive founder of the most successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used his math skills to humiliate Wall Street’s old guard at their trademark game of Liar’s Poker, and years later found himself with a front-row seat to the rapid emergence of mortgage-backed securities; and gadflies and dissenters such as Paul Wilmott, Nassim Taleb, and Benoit Mandelbrot.     With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris…and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future.

    Persuasively written by author, investment strategist, and geopolitical analyst Marko Papic, the book applies a novel framework for making sense of the cacophony of geopolitical risks with the eye towards generating investment-relevant insights.Geopolitical Alpha posits that investors should ignore the media-hyped narratives, insights from smoke-filled rooms, and most of their political consultants and, instead, focus exclusively on the measurable, material constraints facing policymakers. In the tug-of-war between policymaker preferences and their constraints, the latter always win out in the end. Papic uses a wealth of examples from the past decade to illustrate how one can use his constraint-framework to generate Geopolitical Alpha. In the process, the book discusses:What paradigm shifts will drive investment returns over the next decade Why investment and corporate professionals can no longer treat geopolitics as an exogenous risk How to ignore the media and focus on what drives market narratives that generate returns Perfect for investors, C-suite executives, and investment professionals, Geopolitical Alpha belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the intersection of geopolitics, economics, and finance.

    We do this by combining the leverage provided by Options trading strategies with Technical Analysis. If you are a beginning, intermediate or advanced Options Trader, this book is for you. It cuts all the fluff around investing and shows you few simple strategies, which can amplify your Stock Market returns.In this book you will learn: How to become a winner in the stock market by spotting the right trading opportunities. A simple strategy, that keeps doubling your money over and over again. How to defeat the novice Option trader's lottery ticket mentality. A strategy to overcome the premium buyer's greatest enemies, Theta and Implied Volatility How to use simple Technical Analysis techniques to spot the right entry points for your trades. Live Trade examples elaborating all the concepts in this book. The 11th annual challenge is starting soon. Come join us on https://25koptionschallenge.com/ to learn more and view our live trades.