What went wrong with your forray into Options? Would you give it another go? I'm still fairly 'new' to it all myself but have a few decent rules in place to stop me from risking it all.

Any major reason why you didn't stick with it? I'm thinking it's about taking small wins often and hopefully overtime building up the trading bank.

Interested to read about your experiences?

My first forray into the free world was when I leapt into options. It took me 6 months to save the initial investment…then I lost it by the bell!

BUT, more important, I learned how to do whatever it takes to invest! And I was introduced to the leverage of options.

The sad part is that I didn't keep up with it. Knock it dead! and keep pressing.

Grant Nieddu

I've read Van Tharp's, they were quite good.

I make a point of doing all of my analysis, setting stops, Break Even's and Profits before I place a trade, so it 'sort of' takes the psychology out of it once it's all live.

At the moment I'm focusing on Fundamentals, good companies that have crashed or are under valued, I haven't entered the mine field of technical analysis just yet. My trades are placed on 3 – 6 month options so it gives the company a bit of time to sort themselves out.

I'm assuming you're leaning more toward technical analysis than fundamentals? Yeah yeah… maybe this is already schedule for Part 2.

The key to trading to me was always the psychology behind it. Our minds are heavily biased to make “common sense” decisions that are actually harmful to long-term trading success… especially from a risk management perspective.

Haven't read 'fooled by randomness', I seem to have an ever growing 'to-read' list these days!

Keep checking the blog as the next post I do on options will have a few good screen shots & example of stock screeners I use to sift through companies. The amount of financial data out there is amazing.

i'm doing a degree in Actuarial Science so swimming in this stuff.

ever read a book called “fooled by randomness”?

highly recommended.

I played with the Virtual Trading Platform on optionsXpress for months before I committed any real money. Figured out how strategies work and how the profits/losses worked. It was really helpful (and is totally free).

I've got an option at the moment that cost me $0.99 on a $9.40 stock, the stock has moved to $11.30 and my option premium is now worth $1.80. So for a 20% move in the stock price I got an 80% move in my option premium. The leverage of options is the most exciting part!

In part 2 I'll detail one of my big losses (decent lesson learnt). Also the age old human greed thing, I only commit 30% of my trading bank onto the market at a time and 7.5% on any one trade, so i'm fairly restricted by my own risk management rules.