About the author

Guy Cohen, BSc MRICS MBAis the creator and originator of Optioneasyand
has extensive experience of both the US and UK derivatives and stock markets.
Starting his career in commercial real estate, Guy was
elected as a Member of the Royal Insitution of Chartered
Surveyors in 1994. As an investment and development
surveyor, he was involved in advising banks, building
societies, and pension funds and insurance companies on
strategic real estate development and investment matters.
He has also been responsible for commercial developments
and built the development financial modelling infrastructure for an international Real Estate Investment Trust
(REIT).
To complement this work, Guy also pursued rigorous
financial interests, specialising in options under the guidance of Professor
Gordon Gemmill, author of Options Pricing – An International Pespective.
Guy has a degree in Land Management from Reading University, Berkshire
and an MBA (Finance) from City University Business School, London. He is a
successful private investor and trader in his own right and also teaches
individuals, specialising in trading pyschology, Technical Analysis and options
strategies.
For more information about Optioneasy, go to http://www.optioneasy.com

There are several worthy short strategies that can work over and over again
month after month. However, short strategies can put you in an unlimited loss
position and typically have limited upsides. I’m aware of many people who
made their living by selling short options during the late 1990’s tech bubble and
who indeed made fortunes from doing so. But when the market turned, so did
their fortunes and in many cases their livelihoods, their homes, their children’s
education…you get the picture.
The point is, there’s plenty of profit to be gleaned with long strategies with
unlimited upside and limited downside, so we’ll focus on those and make sure
we do them right.
For now, here’s a summary of what you’re about to learn in this book.
Chapter 1is an introduction to options. If you’re already familiar with this
topic, you should still go through it as a review before reading the other options
chapters in the book.
InChapter 2I explain my preferred technical chart patterns and why I like
to trade them from a practical viewpoint. This chapter is focused on my favorite
patterns and is not intended to be an almanac on all the chart patterns known
to man. The aim is to be crystal clear as to what you should be looking for and
why that’s such a valuable approach to take.
We return back to options in Chapter 3where I summarize the Greeks. The
Greeks are sensitivities to various factors affecting the pricing of options. These
sensitivities have a direct effect on your trading.
Chapters 4 through 6take you through my six favored options strategies.
The aim is to trade safely, profitably, and with manageable risk at all times. Only
when you witness the pitfalls of a strategy can you decide whether or not it’s
right for you. In Chapter 6 I explain how to maximize your income return by
trading options—without having to risk too much. The only way to demonstrate
this properly is to show you how some traders get it wrong by exposing
themselves to inordinate amounts of risk, in many cases without even knowing
they’re doing it.
InChapter 7 we run through the steps of creating a trading plan. The steps
are universal for all strategies.
Chapter 8 is the most technically challenging part of the book in which I go
through some of the mathematical algorithms that define the whole subject of
options trading. This chapter is mathematical in nature but has a practical
element to it.
Finally, in Chapter 9I show you how to implement a trading plan for each
of the six favored strategies so you can see how the processes work in practice
and what you’ll need to do as you start to implement your new trading program.