by Jens Rabe and Kai Skoruppa is a pleasant mixture of technical book and practice-oriented trading reading. As you can see from the title, the two authors cover the big wide world of options trading. It is their declared goal to explain the book with 7 seals - called options trading - for the private investor in an understandable way. And without spoiling too much, this goal is achieved.
They have definitely succeeded with this book, because after the almost 400 beautifully illustrated pages - which, however, are not always easy to read due to the language - everyone should have understood the basics of options trading, know the advantages and disadvantages and know whether it makes sense for him/her as an investment or not. In any case, this workbook should be read carefully and with a pen and paper.
In the course of the practical part, in which different strategies are presented and analyzed, they are oriented towards institutional and professional private investors. Unfortunately, or rather logically, this book does not present a consistently successful strategy. Because options business is and remains speculation and the authors convey approaches to minimize the own risk, but they are not able to control it.
The core element of the authors' strategy is the sale of options. They justify this with the help of various studies, which show that on average 70% of the options expire worthless. At the same time, the profit is fixed and the loss is unlimited. How this can be contained is then described in the following.
However, this is also logically understandable, because if there were this one strategy that always works and could be implemented with little effort, it would already be exploited by other market participants and would therefore no longer exist - that is the law of a functioning market. The only possibility is therefore to exploit small asymmetries with the help of time and cognitive effort.
For this purpose, the two authors hand out a smorgasbord of possible strategies, but which one is the right one for an appropriate moment is and remains open.
However, before the basic knowledge about options trading is laid down, this book does not do without a section on the subject of emotions in investing and thus follows in the footsteps of Daniel Kahnemann and his Behavioral Finance.
For absolute beginners in options trading, the chapters around the basics are really helpful. The different types of options including their legal consequences are discussed, useful hints on the price calculation of options are provided, but the arc is not stretched so far that there is talk of the Black-Scholes model.
Nevertheless, it should be clear to the reader after these chapters at the latest that options trading without background knowledge is a potential investment grave. A solid knowledge of financial economics is an absolute must, because otherwise too many conceptual pitfalls await.
If you have really thought it over in advance and definitely want to get into options trading, I can really recommend this book to you, because even if it is not entirely scientific at one point or another, it still conveys well-prepared knowledge from practice.