What Online Options Trading is Not

Like any other trading instruments like forex, index, futures, commodity or even shares trading, options trading involves learning specified trading skills tailored towards options. Furthermore, application of these skills in the real market using real money, patience, perseverance and control in terms of money management and trading psychology are all essential in your options trading journey. In summary, options trading demand a fair amount of hard work from you, thus it's definitely not a get-rich-quick program.

As mentioned, you could buy options as cheaply as $50 per contract or you could buy options which are as high as few thousands dollars per contract. Don’t be misled by thinking you could buy a bundle of cheap options at $50 per contract and prayed that you could strike lottery if the share moves up (or down) substantially and your options would now fetch few hundred or even few thousand percents in profit. The price of the option contract, known as the premium, is set by the market maker and if its set so cheaply, just beware that there’s a reason behind it. Cheap options could be priced that cheaply because (1) the share on which the options are traded are not or not in the habit of making a substantial move (2) the option may be expiring soon thus it’s time value is diminishing rapidly. Sorry to burst your bubble but you might end up holding a bundle of options which would expire worthless if you did not bother to do your homework to check whether the stock is going to make a substantial move in your anticipated direction in the near future, ie. earnings outcome, upcoming FDA approval for drug etc.

If you want to sustain your options trading journey from the stage where you would commit every beginner mistakes till the stage where you could cut your losses quickly and decisively and learn how to let your profits run, I believe you would require at least the following pre-requisites :

1) You are not under-capitalized

From my experiences and what I read from most options trading books, web-sites, it is advisable that you have at least a minimum capital of US$5,000 to trade options. If you could afford more, of course it's better.

In the beginning of your options trading journey, you are bound to commit trading mistakes like buying too early, exiting too late, entering the order wrongly ie. sell instead of buy, overbuying, holding on to a losing position.

Due to your inexperience, you might also end up buying options for the wrong types of stocks in the beginning. All these costly mistakes would certainly lead you to lose your capital fairly quickly. Trading losses are also known as drawdowns. Let’s say you experienced a series of losses (this COULD happen) and your capital is down 50%. If you started out with $5,000, you would still have $2,500 hopefully to turn your situation around. But if you started with $2,000 instead and after a 50% loss, you are now left with $1,000, which might not give you enough fire power to build up your trading capital especially if you still carry on losing due to your inexperience.

Thus, if you are under-capitalized, my advice is - don’t trade, unless the particular situation is extremely favourable to the options that you intend to trade eg. if you would have a high probability of winning when you buy a call in a very bullish market and likewise you would be profitable buying a put in a very bearish market.

2) You practice good money management

For instance, if you allocate only 5% of your trading capital on every trade and you happen to lose 3 trades in a row, you would have lost 15% of your capital & still have 85% of your capital left. Let’s say you started out with $5,000 trading capital and you allocate only $250 (5%) for each trade. If you encountered 3 losses in a row, you would be down $750 with a balance of $4,250 capital, still quite substantial to keep trading for a while if you continue sticking to the 5% commitment per trading rule. To recover your capital back to $5,000, you would require a 17.6% gain (750/4,250 x 100%).

Let’s say you did not practice proper money management in your options trading and you plunge $1,000 in the few 3 trades which lose money subsequently. Now you would require a 42.8 % gain (3,000/7,000 x 100%) in order to recover your capital back to $5,000.

The lower you traded down your capital, the higher the percentage of gain you have to achieve in order to recover your trading capital. Thus, it’s very important that you practice good money management in your trading right at the beginning ie. committing only 5% or less of your capital in every trade so that you could keep your trading capital for a longer period and minimize the necessity to achieve higher percentage gains in order to recover a heavily traded down account.

The following table would give you a guideline on how much percentage gains you would require to build back your starting capital.

Down % Gain Required

5% 5.3 %

10% 11.1 %

15% 17.6 %

20% 25%

30% 42.9 %

50% 100 %

75% 300 %

Hope you would bear in mind the above considerations when you trade options.