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Stock Options Trading – How to Profit From Falling Stock Prices

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When it comes to making money on the Stock Market you will find everyone has their own view on the best strategy to use.

One of the most common strategies to make money in the short term is to buy shares and sell them at a profit once the share price has risen.

This is called Stock Trading, and can be a very effective way to profit from shares.

However just lately we have been looking at a downward and quite volatile move in our markets.

Right now many traders are sitting back ‘waiting for the market to get back to normal’ before they begin to profit again, but who knows how long bear markets last?

And what are these traders going to do for CASH in the meantime?

I believe in trading a strategy that suits the direction of the market, not waiting for the market to eventually comply with the criteria of just one particular strategy.

While everyone else has been running the other way in the present market conditions, there are quite a few traders who have been making consistent profits.

How are they making money on falling stock prices?

Well there are several ways to achieve this, some more complicated and costly than others. The most affordable, easy to understand and easy to implement trading vehicle I have found that will help you make money on a falling stock is Put Options.

Put Options began many years ago as a hedging instrument. That is they were designed as an insurance instrument for shares.

Basically a Put Option is a contact that relates to a particular stock and gives you the right to sell that stock at a fixed price within a certain period of time. For this right we pay a premium.

So an example of hedging would be if you owned some shares that you paid $ 20 for and bought a put option for insurance. This would give you the right to sell your shares at any time (during the life of the option) for $ 20, even if the share price fell to just a few dollars.

How do you make money using PUT options?

The most common way is to trade the actual Put Option and NEVER buy or sell the stock. This is called Options Trading.

As the share price drops in value, the value of the Put Option actually INCREASES. You want to buy puts in a falling market and then sell for profit.

Let’s imagine that ABC shares are trading at $ 40 and our analysis tells us that the price may fall even lower.

We could buy an ABC $ 40 Put Option and for this we might pay $ 2.

We now have the right to sell those shares at any time before expiry of the option for $ 40. But we don’t own the shares, nor are we interested in owning the shares.

Soon after we buy the option, the share price falls to $ 30. So if we wanted to, we could buy the shares now at the market price of $ 30 and sell them with our put option for $ 40 resulting in a $ 10 profit.

That sounds appealing?

To do this however, we would have to come up with the $ 30 each share to be able to buy them before we could get that $ 10 profit in our hot little hands. What if we don’t have that kind of money to spare?

Here’s the power!

Because the share price has fallen, our Put Option could now be worth $ 12. And because we only paid $ 2 for it initially, we are now looking at a $ 10 profit.

We would then sell the put option on the market for $ 12 and realize our $ 10 profit, and all we had to come up with to do this was the initial $ 2 we paid for the option contract.

This is called leverage and it is a very powerful way to make money from a smaller amount of money.

And the maximum amount we stand to lose if we get it wrong? Just the $ 2 we paid for our option in the first place.

Options Trading Forum for beginners to advanced traders

Options Trading Forum

To your ultimate success

Lorraine James

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