Review of Udemy Course: Options Trading for Rookies: Understand Options Completely

"Options Trading for Rookies: Understand Options Completely" will quickly help you understand the basics of Options trading in just a few hours.

Course

The course is by Kal Zurn and is a paid course on Udemy. It runs around 2.5 hours. It's the most expensive of his courses at $124.99, although I think he runs specials now and then. The follow-on courses are a lot less expensive, usually around $14-$16 each.

Overview

The course is broken into several sections: Intro, Defining Options, Options vs Stocks, Call Options, Put Options, and a "Bonus Section" Vertical Options. (He digs much deeper into verticals in the follow-on courses.)

At first glance, I was a little worried this would be too basic for me. I've been trading Options for a while, have watched a lot of YouTube videos, read several articles, and already took courses on stock trading before this.

Fortunately, I'm glad I didn't skip this course and go straight to his more advanced classes. That's because for each section, he digs into several scenarios; helps better understand Probability of Profit (POP); and, finally, how and when a trade can lose even if the original thesis is correct -- probably the most confusing aspect of Options trading for beginners.

Critique

Overall, a big thumbs up on this course if you have you been trading Options for less than a year, only dabbled, or lack confidence that you truly "get it." Side note: I find it easier to follow a specific track for training in a course format than by clicking through seemingly random YouTube training videos. 

A kind of annoying negative to note however. The volume really varies throughout the sections. For example, let's say he's talking at "volume 6 of 10" in one section, but in the next where he is doing an aside, he may suddenly be at "volume 9 of 10" and you have to scramble to turn down the volume (only to turn it back up in a later section.)

Rating

Strongly Recommended

Recommended

Not Recommended

How to filter on IVR in TOS Spread Hacker

I had a mission of consolidating all of my tools to Think or Swim (TOS) and, knowing that options trading is my main jam, I needed to be able to scan for credit spreads based on IV Rank. Most people will sell spread when IVR > 50% and buy them when IVR < 50%.

My first stab at this was to build a filter in Spread Hacker using: Max Profit, DTE, and Delta (I have since removed that):

That works great. The struggle now is only looking at credit spreads where the IVR > 50%. There is no filter for that in Spread Hacker unfortunately. At first I thought this was a dead-end. But in poking around, I found that you can restrict the filter to a watchlist. Interesting.

Next, I asked myself: Can I create a dynamic watchlist? That is, a watchlist that changes based on real-time criteria? The answer is YES. A dynamic watchlist is known as a "Scan Query" in TOS.

I created a Scan Query using IV_Percentile, which TOS names IVR for some strange, legacy reason. The filters for this Scan Query are very easy. I can't properly show them here because TOS won't show all the filters without scrolling (which is kind of dumb), but basically you need to do this:

1. Create a new Scan Query
2. Delete all of the defaults
3. Add Stock->Market Cap (I set to >= $1B)
4. Add Study->IV_Percentile (I set to 50% <= x <= 100%)
5. For Show, I set to 200.
6. Set the name to be "High IVR".
7. Click Save.

You now have a dynamic watchlist of high IVR stocks. We'll use this to restrict the results of Spread Hacker.

1. Go to Spread Hacker
2. Setup the filters
3. Set Spreads For->Personal->High IVR
4. Click Scan

You will now see credit spreads for high IVR stocks.