Protect Your Stocks Using Put Options

Posted by on September 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

Hoping and praying that the stocks that you just bought will go up is not the best strategy to use, however it is the one very often used by the average Joe stock trader who is stock trading internet. The only salvation they have is that in bull markets most stocks will go up.

Statistics show that in a bull market about 75% of the stocks will follow the general trend and go up, and in a bear market 75% will also go down. Trading with the trend is the best way to trade as 9 out of 12 stocks will follow the trend and give you the best chance of making gains on your stock purchases.

But what if you own some good stocks and don’t want to sell when the market is clearly going down, or about to go down?. There are a couple of tactics that you can consider, both of which involve the use of options, CALL options and PUT options. There is the widely known strategy called Covered Calls, and the much lesser known one called the Married Put.

If you are going to trade options it is essential that before you start trading you get the best option trading education that you can. You should also practice stock trading until you are comfortable with the process. This is a very important point that must be taken seriously, if you don’t understand the terminology and theory then you should not be trading options. If Put option, Call option, Married Put and Covered Call are new to you then don’t trade until you have studied sufficiently.

Selling call options against your stock in 100 share increments is the basis of the covered call strategy and it can provide about a 2-7% buffer against the loss in stock price. However a bigger drop in stock price will not be compensated for using the covered call strategy, in general.

Stocks in a bear market, and even in a bull market, can drop quickly on news or earnings releases, as much as 15 to 40% within a month. Using covered calls to protect your stocks will only provide limited protection of less than 7% at best and so will not save you if the stock takes a 40% tumble.

The better solution to providing downside stock protection is the option strategy called the Married Put. As the name suggests the PUT that you buy is used to provide protection when the stock goes down because Put options will increase in value when the stock decreases in value. The term married is used because the option that is selected has to be very compatible with the stock, in other words a good match, if the strategy is to work.

The selection of the best Put option is not straight forward and involves several criteria which are listed below:

1. The strike price of the option

2. The current stock price

3. Choice of options, in or out of the money

4. Put expiration time

Even though the married Put protection only has a short life span if offers much more protection than the covered call. It can provide as much as 90-95% loss recovery in the event of a significant drop in the stock price.

The downside of the good protection is that you have buy the Put which is a debit whereas the covered call is a credit. But there are ways of offsetting this expense and there is much more to this strategy when executed correctly. The Married Put can be made to pay for itself and used to generate good gains if the market, or stock to be specific, moves a lot.

The general idea of the Collar Trade is to combine the covered call and married Put strategy into one, this is what is called the Collar Trade. In effect you put a collar around the stock, sell a call and buy a PUT. If you do this correctly most of the cost of the Put can be offset by the credit from the covered call so you can protect your valuable stock at almost no cost. Yes this is a great strategy which the general public is unfortunately ignorant of, and most brokers don’t understand.

The strategy that I have outlined above is unknown to the average stock market trader but is one of the best trading systems you could have.

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Top Moving Average Secrets

Posted by on September 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

One of the most popular technical analysis indicators is the simple moving average also known as SMA, if you learn how to use these correctly they can be a very useful tool to help you to make good trading decisions.

The 50 simple moving average, or 50 SMA, is simply the sum of the last 50 values for each period, divided by 50, this is a moving window, as time moves on so does the average. Notice that I used the term period because this indicator works on any time period in exactly the same way.

It can be used on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, 30 minutes, 10 minute and on whatever time period you want to monitor and trade. Although the SMA is the most widley used there is also the exponential moving average or EMA. This is a weighted version of the formula using the mathematical exponent function to give more weight to the more recent values, this has the effect of making it a slightly faster average that many traders prefer.

The truth is that it probably does not matter if you used the SMA or the EMA, what does matter however is that you use one or the other and then be very consistent with it. Do not switch between them, it is more important that you trust your chosen indicator then a slight difference in its value.

The simple moving average is primarily used to determine what the current trend of the stock is, depending on the value used it could be a short term, medium term or long term trend. An important point to note is that moving averages are most useful when the stock is trending, if the moving average is flat, i.e. horizontal on your chart it can become very choppy, this is a good time to not trade.

The general rule is that if the chart price is above the SMA the trend is up, if below the trend is down. This is very important to know because it forms the basics of trend trading and trading with the trend.

For the short term trend many traders like using a 5-8 SMA or EMA, here is a trading secret, never trade again the direction of the short term tend, actually this is really just common sense when you think about it.

Moving averages can often act as support or resistance, many traders use the 15, 21 or 30 SMA for this purpose.

There are a number of other very important moving averages that you need to know about, these are the 50, 100 and 200 SMA, and this mainly applies to the daily and weekly charts. A lot of big players in the markets, like the the mutual funds, investment banks etc use the 50 and 200 SMA as support and resistance, if they decide to buy or sell based on these you need to follow suite, the 100 to a lesser extent. These are very useful averages to watch if you trade EFT’s like an Oil ETF.

A useful tip is that when a stock breaks through one moving average it will often move all the way to the next, for example, if a stock breaks the 30 it may move to the 50 before finding some support or resistance.

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How To Trade Options Correctly

Posted by on September 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

There is a lot of hype surrounding options trading, and for good reason, it’s a good way make a lot of money fast, or can be used to grow your capital consistently month after month.

There’s also a lot of hype about how complicated it is and why you need to spend thousands of dollars on options trading education before you get started. Needless to say this last statement usually comes from trading seminar companies trying to sell your their trading course on options.

Lets cover a few of the basics about options trading and set you straight about a few important points. Firstly yes it is true that you can make a lot of money trading options, but of course you can also lose money just as fast.

When trading stocks your leverage is 1:1, if you go on margin you can get get 1:2 leverage, but thats about it. With options it is not as straight forward to calculate the leverage but generally speaking you can get between 1:5 and 1:10 when you buy an option on a stock, or ETF.

So with 1:10 leverage, when the stock increases by 5% your option can increase by approx 50%, and this can happen in just a few days, this is why swing trading strategies using options on stocks is so popular.

However the downside is that the reverse can happen, if the stock drops by 5% your option can also drop by 50%, at which point you may want to close the trade and save some of your option value, it really depends on what your stop loss and risk management plan is.

What I’ve just described is called directional option trading where you are betting on the getting the direction of the stock movement correct, this is highly speculative. Options can also be used in option strategies which are much more non directional, such as covered call trades, credit spreads and Iron Condors. In these trades there is much lower dependance on getting the stock direction correct, but it still matters.

So should you trades options?, in my opinion you should not do directional option trades until you become very good at trading stocks. This is because you must be very precise with your entry and exit strategy and trading plan, and be very good at technical analysis.

Whereas if you want to do non directional option trades you don’t need to be such an experianced stock trader to be successful, but of course it does not hurt either.

Learning how to trade options is a very useful skill you have, but don’t rush into it and blow out your account. Make sure that you get a good options trading education before you start, and also make sure that you have a very solid stock trading education as well, such one from Top Dog Trading Review.

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How To Buy A Trading Seminar

Posted by on September 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

If you are about to start, or are already in the process of learning how to trade, or day trade, you may have already been searching the internet using Google or Yahoo for day trading training education, tools, software or seminars, and have found that there is a lot on offer.

For example “trading course” brings up 758,000 pages in Google and “trading seminar” another 109,000 pages, the question is what should you be looking for when selecting a trading course or seminar. In this article I’ll point out some of the things to check before spending your hard earned money on your trading education.

1. Becareful of the hidden costs involved in a trading seminar that is away from home, account for the expense of hotels, meals travel and car rental?, it may be much more than you expect.

2. What is the return policy, this can vary widely between trading education companies, for some you only have a 3 day cooling off period while for others you may have up to 12 noon or the end of the 1st day to ask for your money back if you decide this was not.

3. For a live seminar are you also given DVD’s of the same or similar content?, so often live seminars fail to explain all the very important details involved in day trading. Having a set of DVD’s enables you to review the content over and over again at home until you get it. Beware that some companies will charge you extra for the DVD’s even though you have already paid for a live trading seminar.

4. Check the internet for positive and negative feedback on the company and trading seminar. Use search terms like “company name review”, “company name refunds” or “company name scam”. Often reviews are posted in trading forums, these can be found by searching for terms like “trading forum”.

5. In advance try and find out exactly who will be presenting the seminar. The last thing that you want is a professional “teacher” presenting a seminar on trading, what you want is a “trader” who makes his living by trading and only does a few seminars a month out of interest and for personal reasons, not because they need the money.

6. If you are buying an online day trading or investing course where the content is 100% viewed online you should get at least a 30 day 100% money back guarantee, if not stay away.

7. If you are buying a course or trading seminar in which DVD’s and manuals are being shipped to your house, again you should expect a 30 day 100% money back return policy, less shipping and handling, again if not stay away.

8. It’s very likely that you will have questions after watching either the live or online course or watching the DVD’s, make sure that you will be able to ask questions and have them answered, either one on one or in a forum setting.

9. Last, but not least, before buying do a lot of window shopping. The price for trading seminars, either stocks, options, Forex or futures varies widely from $50 for an ebook to over $25K for a comprehensive set of training. You may be able to find the same material much cheaper at a different company.

Also be aware that day trading education and seminar companies are always running specials and offering discounts, before you buy search the internet carefully for any deals and also call the company directly and ask for a low price guarantee. In other words make sure that you are paying the lowest price that they are offering the product for.

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Key Pieces Of Stock Market Ticker

Posted by on August 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

A banner that runs a constant scrolling of current prices of stocks is known as stock market ticker. It gives you information and in real time about the stock market. So, it actually doesn’t teach you about how to buy shares, it only give shares and stock information.

When something exciting is happening, many stock market ticker will provide those information, especially about the market.

There is so much trading that goes on in today’s markets that the stock price listed for any given company is likely to change at least a little each time it comes around again on the ticker.

Some tickers are truly running in real time, but most have a certain amount of delay. If you want the actual up to date numbers, usually you have to pay a fee.

It is not necessary for many investors to have the exact real time prices, unless they are day trading where they need to sell or buy quickly during the day.

Through many source online or an online brokerage account, you can actually set up your own stock market ticker to simply show which information you’re interested in. You may want to just keep an eye on the stocks that you have invested in.

Or perhaps while you are considering a purchase, you might want to scroll just a single stock with all the breaking news and information displayed as soon as it is available. From the ticker, you can even get information about stock market holidays.

There is another option to set up a ticker, that is to set it up from a specific area only that you’re interested in, for example, tech stocks, oil companies, or car companies if you like to see numbers moving very fast!

Either way, the stock market ticker can be a useful investing tool. Its job is to let you know quickly that something has changed. Then you will be alerted and can search for more information from other new sources to find out what has caused a stock to go up or down.

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Online Commodity Trading – The Story

Posted by on August 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

When it comes to trading on the internet, then online commodity trading is a good opportunity. Larger volumes and profits potential are right at the front if you know what you are doing, since the interest in the market is currently increasing.

You can join some schools who provide courses, even only last for few days, but they teach people about the basics of the stock market and online commodity trading.

It is very important for you to understand everything, at least some basics about commodity trading before you get started and learn how to place or how to control your orders in the commodity market.

Learn from professionals how they make money thru selling and buying will give you a good samples on how you need to conduct yourself even though the stocks you will be joining will likely be on a much smaller scale. This also include learning how to use stock market software.

Learn which online commodity trading transactions that have the most risk, that way you can always control your exposure to great losses. It doesn’t matter even if you find the russian stock market seemed to be more lucrative than the one in the US for example.

Learn the market, and you will be able to determine which investments are likely good for you and which ones should be avoided for their risk factors. To increase your leverage, use different type of contracts at the same time. Such as dow index.

This makes the trading more complicated, but when done correctly it makes it more profitable and less risky. You must have discipline and move cautiously with an established plan and solid knowledge of the market and the software you are using if you hope to do well in the online commodity trading market.

If you put the time in to learning the market and make carefully scripted decisions, you may find that online commodity trading is very lucrative. For some it becomes a full time career.

The internet makes it flexible so you can start slow and increase your trading volume as you get more comfortable. Soon you may be able to quit your day job!

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Establishing A Day Trading Plan

Posted by on July 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

How imperative is it to maintain a day trading plan?

Why do you want a trading plan?

This piece of writing will explore various significant aspects of why you must use a trading plan, as well as the vital fundamentals of your trading plan.

A trading plan is of extraordinary significance to your trading success. Trading is a business, and most businesses want a plan. Wise planning is vital to your success. In fact, strategic plan developmentdevelopment will do you well in business as well as in trading.

If you don’t have a trading plan, your trading decisions are commonly based on hunches and emotions – and odds are you will not achieve trading success, over the long term.

If trying to trade with no a trading plan – costly mistakes are inevitable. Emotional decisions are the generally destructive aspect for a trader. Do not permit your emotions to dictate your trading routine.
It is not necessary to have a complex trading plan, keep your trading plan straightforward. Have a written trading plan, as the process of writing things down can be critical to your success as a trader.

After spending many trading days paper trading your system, you are more easily able to set out and organize a trading plan.

A trading plan must involve not only your goals but must also detail how you plan to achieve them.

Reliable procedures can only be achieved through a comprehensive written trading plan. Traders must have confidence in their trading plans, and remain true to their trading plan.

A day trading plan has got to contain some basic issues such as your trading goals and objectives. A trading plan should consist of your entries, profit targets and stop loss.

Entering into a trade is one of the earliest decisions you create when trading. However, it is also one of the least important…….

A trading plan has got to also cover position size. How much are you prepared to lose on one trade? The lesser the percentage of your trading balance committed to any one trade, the greater the possibility of your being being triumphant. You need to identify the highest amount at risk for every trade. You also need to identify the highest amount you are prepared to go down for the day before you stop trading. Protecting your investment, or money management, is unmistakably an enormously essential ingredient of success.

The goal is not simply to create money, but also to be able to keep on making cash consistently for an unlimited period of time.

When in a winning trade, be tolerant and totally benefit from the success. The known trading axiom is, “cut your losses short and let your profits run”.

A trading plan should outline precise goals to accomplish within a set time.

Having a written trading plan gives you an edge over nearly all others and as the failure percentage of traders is so elevated, how can you afford not to take part in a written trading plan.

A written trading plan will not assure you success, but not having one will pretty much promise failure.

The fundamental to any day trading plan is how well it holds over time.

Have you paper traded your method for a fair period of time? This would give you confidence to accept every separate setup. If you have a few stopouts in a row, which is unavoidable to occur at a few stage, you continue to take all the trades. Will your system work in the long term?

You have tried your system and tested it and you are happy to go live with it. Now is the point in time to write out your day trading plan.

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