Options trading how it works

Binary Options 101.

What are Binary Options?

Although they are a relatively new way to trade within the financial markets, Binaries are growing fast. They were legalized in the United States in 2008, and have quickly become one of the fastest ways to trade. Fast does not equal effective all of the time, though.

Traders need to be cautious when working within this market. They are.

very different from other types of trading.

because with these, you are not actually taking ownership of any assets. Instead, you are attempting to predict the movement of the underlying asset only. Think of it as a prediction of which way a particular asset is going to move and less of a long term investment. Try trading with a Trusted Broker of our Choice.

How do Binaries Work?

In their simplest form, binary options can go only one of two directions, hence their name. You can be right or you can be wrong. They are an all or nothing type of trade and there is no middle ground. This might sound threatening, but they really are quite easy to understand . You select an asset and then predict whether you think that asset will go up or down in price. Once you figure this out, the broker that you are working with will display the percentage amount that you will have returned to you prior to officially committing your money to the trade. You then select the amount that you want to risk and the timeframe which you want to work within. Once these basic factors are all accounted for, you will click on the button that executes the trade.

This is one of the greatest things about binary options. You have more information about how the trade will conclude with this type of trading than with any other type of trading. You know exactly how much you stand to gain and exactly at what time that money will appear in your account if you are correct in your prediction. Binaries explain all of these things prior to your commitment.

Trading Tip – Make sure your computer is working in an optimal state.

What Can You Trade?

With binary options, you can trade all of the major currency pairs, stocks, indices, and commodities. The exciting thing is that you are not limited to any one place. Whether you want to trade gold futures, Apple’s stock, or the Japanese yen , you can do it all from the same platform. You can also trade on an international scale without having to change brokers. Many of the top brokers include numerous stocks and indices from Europe and Asia, allowing international traders to use their platforms without problem. The good news for you is that brokers act as a one stop shopping place for all of your trading needs. You can trade pretty much everything with the same web site without having to keep switching screens .

How Long Do Trades Last?

With binary options, it’s important to remember that all of your trades will have strict time lines that you need to pay attention to. Some of these can be pretty short or they can last a bit longer. Ultimately, you will need to decide what timeframes work best for you . If you don’t like having money tied up in a trade for a long time, 60 second or 5 minute options might be best for you. If you don’t mind waiting, you can trade hour long trades or longer.

The thing to remember about expiry times is that they are adaptable only up until you commit to the trade. Once the trade is locked in, you must sit back and wait. This is different from other types of trading where you can sell off your purchased shares at any time you want, but it is a fact of options trading that you cannot get around. Some brokers will allow you to sell off your trade for a small refund, but this is a rare scenario that you shouldn’t worry about until you become an advanced trader. Instead, it’s far more important to spend time researching trades beforehand.

Main Types of Options.

There are three main types of binary options that you need to be aware of. The first is the basic call/put trade. Here you are simply attempting to predict whether the price of the asset will have gone up or down at the time expiration.

The next type of trade is the one touch trade. Here, you will be given a target price at the beginning of the trade. If the asset reaches that price or beyond at any time during the life of the trade, your investment will be deemed a profitable one. This price is always stipulated by the broker before you execute the trade so you can best prepare your information ahead of time.

The last of the three major types is the boundary trade. With this choice, the broker will give you a range of prices and it is up to you to determine whether the price of the asset will be within or outside the given range.

There are a few different variations of these trades, and some of the more exotic versions can have pretty high payouts, some around 300 percent, depending upon the broker. One example is a one touch trade with a really far off target price. Usually, in order to get the big payouts on these , you need to go with the hardest to reach option. For this example, you would have to select that yes, the far off target price will be attained. These have higher rates of return because they are much harder to be correct with.

Which Binary Option is Best for Me?

Figuring out which choice is going to be best for you is something that will be different for each person. First, you want to look at where your experience is. Are you a former Forex trader looking to augment profits with a new strategy? If this is the case, your expertise on the currency market is fully transferable to the binary options marketplace. Or maybe you are a former day trader, looking to alleviate some of your risk . If this is true, binary options can help, and you will want to begin with your focus on the stocks that you are most familiar with.

Ultimately though, it comes down to what your goals are. You need to figure out what your trading goals might be and then develop a plan to realize those goals. If you want to make $1,000 per week, you need to figure out which types of options will help you to hit this mark , and which timeframes will be best suited to get you there. The answer to the above question is something that will be different for each person, but you should always place an emphasis on the quality of your trading and not on the quantity. Five trades per day that are correct are going to return more to you than six correct and four incorrect.

Where do I Start?

First, you need to select a broker. Once you’ve figured out which broker will best suit your needs, you deposit your trading money with them via a credit card or wire transfer. Make sure that your trading money is money that you can afford to lose and not funds that you will need to get through your daily life.

Once you have created an account and have funded it, you are set to begin trading. But you shouldn’t start right away. Many brokers now have demo trading accounts, and you need to take full advantage of these if you can. Demo trading is basically no-risk trading since real cash is never exchanged. You are given play money and for a limited time you are able to trade those play dollars in real time and learn the ropes of how binary options work. The longer you demo trade, the smaller the learning curve will be when you start trading with your own real money. Even if you only have 72 hours to demo trade, you need to capitalize on this. At the very least, you want to learn the software that you will be using in order to eliminate the possibility of user error.

Demo trading should be used as much as possible until you have established a method that works for you and you are confident with it. You want to eliminate the possibility of mistake because of inexperience . You want to use them as much as possible while you have the opportunity available to you.

Conclusion.

Binary trading is fast paced and exciting, but it’s not for everyone. There can be a lot of risk in binary options trading. If you are new or simply changing your venue, binaries can have a lot to offer. Know that binary options have a lot of possibility for profits, but because of their all or nothing nature, there is also the chance that you can lose substantial amounts of money. For this reason, you will want to get as much practice as possible and want to do as much research as you can. These lessons are a good place to start your journey.

***Your capital may be at risk. This material is not investment advice.***

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Thanks for checking out Binary Options University. There is one major topic that must be talked about way up front. RISK! Although you could make a lot of money trading these instruments, it’s also very easy to lose everything you invest. Please understand the Binary Risks before you invest any money. This site is for entertainment purposes and should not be held responsible for any losses you may incur. Advertising dollars are generated by clicking on some of the outbound links. You can learn more about this on our Privacy Policy.

Options Basics: How Options Work.

Options contracts are essentially the price probabilities of future events. The more likely something is to occur, the more expensive an option would be that profits from that event. This is the key to understanding the relative value of options.

Let’s take as a generic example a call option on International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) with a strike price of $200; IBM is currently trading at $175 and expires in 3 months. Remember, the call option gives you the right , but not the obligation , to purchase shares of IBM at $200 at any point in the next 3 months. If the price of IBM rises above $200, then you “win.” It doesn’t matter that we don’t know the price of this option for the moment – what we can say for sure, though, is that the same option that expires not in 3 months but in 1 month will cost less because the chances of anything occurring within a shorter interval is smaller. Likewise, the same option that expires in a year will cost more. This is also why options experience time decay: the same option will be worth less tomorrow than today if the price of the stock doesn’t move.

Returning to our 3-month expiration, another factor that will increase the likelihood that you’ll “win” is if the price of IBM stock rises closer to $200 – the closer the price of the stock to the strike, the more likely the event will happen. Thus, as the price of the underlying asset rises, the price of the call option premium will also rise. Alternatively, as the price goes down – and the gap between the strike price and the underlying asset prices widens – the option will cost less. Along a similar line, if the price of IBM stock stays at $175, the call with a $190 strike price will be worth more than the $200 strike call – since, again, the chances of the $190 event happening is greater than $200.

There is one other factor that can increase the odds that the event we want to happen will occur – if the volatility of the underlying asset increases. Something that has greater price swings – both up and down – will increase the chances of an event happening. Therefore, the greater the volatility, the greater the price of the option. Options trading and volatility are intrinsically linked to each other in this way.

With this in mind, let’s consider a hypothetical example. Let's say that on May 1, the stock price of Cory's Tequila Co. (CTQ) is $67 and the premium (cost) is $3.15 for a July 70 Call, which indicates that the expiration is the third Friday of July and the strike price is $70. The total price of the contract is $3.15 x 100 = $315. In reality, you'd also have to take commissions into account, but we'll ignore them for this example. On most U. S. exchanges, a stock option contract is the option to buy or sell 100 shares; that's why you must multiply the contract by 100 to get the total price. The strike price of $70 means that the stock price must rise above $70 before the call option is worth anything; furthermore, because the contract is $3.15 per share, the break-even price would be $73.15.

Three weeks later the stock price is $78. The options contract has increased along with the stock price and is now worth $8.25 x 100 = $825. Subtract what you paid for the contract, and your profit is ($8.25 - $3.15) x 100 = $510. You almost doubled our money in just three weeks! You could sell your options, which is called "closing your position," and take your profits – unless, of course, you think the stock price will continue to rise. For the sake of this example, let's say we let it ride.

By the expiration date, the price of CTQ drops down to $62. Because this is less than our $70 strike price and there is no time left, the option contract is worthless. We are now down by the original premium cost of $315.

To recap, here is what happened to our option investment:

So far we've talked about options as the right to buy or sell (exercise) the underlying good. This is true, but in reality, a majority of options are not actually exercised. In our example, you could make money by exercising at $70 and then selling the stock back in the market at $78 for a profit of $8 a share. You could also keep the stock, knowing you were able to buy it at a discount to the present value. However, the majority of the time holders choose to take their profits by trading out (closing out) their position. This means that holders sell their options in the market, and writers buy their positions back to close. According to the CBOE​, only about 10% of options are exercised, 60% are traded (closed) out, and 30% expire worthless.

At this point it is worth explaining more about the pricing of options. In our example the premium (price) of the option went from $3.15 to $8.25. These fluctuations can be explained by intrinsic value and extrinsic value, also known as time value. An option's premium is the combination of its intrinsic value and its time value. Intrinsic value is the amount in-the-money, which, for a call option, means that the price of the stock equals the strike price. Time value represents the possibility of the option increasing in value. Refer back to the beginning of this section of the turorial: the more likely an event is to occur, the more expensive the option. This is the extrinsic, or time value. So, the price of the option in our example can be thought of as the following:

In real life options almost always trade at some level above their intrinsic value, because the probability of an event occurring is never absolutely zero, even if it is highly unlikely. If you are wondering, we just picked the numbers for this example out of the air to demonstrate how options work.

A brief word on options pricing. As we’ve seen, the relative price of an option has to do with the chances that an event will happen. But in order to put an absolute price on an option, a pricing model must be used. The most well-known model is the Black-Scholes-Merton​ model, which was derived in the 1970’s, and for which the Nobel prize in economics was awarded. Since then other models have emerged such as binomial and trinomial tree models, which are also commonly used.

Options Basics Tutorial.

Nowadays, many investors' portfolios include investments such as mutual funds, stocks and bonds. But the variety of securities you have at your disposal does not end there. Another type of security, known as options, presents a world of opportunity to sophisticated investors who understand both the practical uses and inherent risks associated with this asset class.

The power of options lies in their versatility, and their ability to interact with traditional assets such as individual stocks. They enable you to adapt or adjust your position according to many market situations that may arise. For example, options can be used as an effective hedge against a declining stock market to limit downside losses. Options can be put to use for speculative purposes or to be exceedingly conservative, as you want. Using options is therefore best described as part of a larger strategy of investing.

This functional versatility, however, does not come without its costs. Options are complex securities and can be extremely risky if used improperly. This is why, when trading options with a broker, you'll often come across a disclaimer like the following:

Options involve risks and are not suitable for everyone. Option trading can be speculative in nature and carry substantial risk of loss. Only invest with risk capital.

Options belong to the larger group of securities known as derivatives. This word has come to be associated with excessive risk taking and having the ability crash economies. That perception, however, is broadly overblown. All “derivative” means is that its price is dependent on, or derived from the price of something else. Put this way, wine is a derivative of grapes; ketchup is a derivative of tomatoes. Options are derivatives of financial securities – their value depends on the price of some other asset. That is all derivative means, and there are many different types of securities that fall under the name derivatives, including futures, forwards, swaps (of which there are many types), and mortgage backed securities. In the 2008 crisis, it was mortgage backed securities and a particular type of swap that caused trouble. Options were largely blameless. (See also: 10 Options Strategies To Know .)

Properly knowing how options work, and how to use them appropriately can give you a real advantage in the market. If the speculative nature of options doesn't fit your style, no problem – you can use options without speculating. Even if you decide never to use options, however, it is important to understand how companies that you are investing in use them. Whether it is to hedge the risk of foreign-exchange transactions or to give employees ownership in the form of stock options, most multi-nationals today use options in some form or another.

This tutorial will introduce you to the fundamentals of options. Keep in mind that most options traders have many years of experience, so don't expect to be an expert immediately after reading this tutorial. If you aren't familiar with how the stock market works, you might want to check out the Stock Basics tutorial first.

How a Put Option Trade Works.

Put options are bets that the price of the underlying asset is going to fall. Puts are excellent trading instruments when you’re trying to guard against losses in stock, futures contracts, or commodities that you already own.

Here is a typical situation where buying a put option can be beneficial: Say, for example, that you bought XYZ at $31, but you start getting concerned, because the stock price is starting to drift down because the market is weakening.

A good way to protect yourself when you’re in this situation is to buy a put option. So you decide to buy an August 30 put for a $1 premium, which costs you $100.

By buying the put, you’re locking in the value of your stock at $30 per share until the expiration date on the third Friday in August. If the stock price falls to $20 per share, you still can sell it to someone at $30 per share, as long as the option has not expired. Indeed, the put option gives you the right to sell the stock at $30 no matter how low the price falls.

Using the put option as portfolio insurance fixes your worst risk at $200, which includes the $100 premium you paid for the put option and the $1 per share you can lose after originally paying $31 per share for the stock, if you exercise the put.

Your other alternative when the stock falls below $30 is to sell the put to the market and profit from the appreciation of the option while holding onto the stock.