Review
"Quick Cash with Straddles & Strangles" is very specific to the author's strategy around Fed announcements and gold. If you are looking for a better understanding of straddles & strangles, especially when selling them, this isn't the book for you.
Course/Book
"Quick Cash with Straddles & Strangles" by Matt Morris.
I found this as a Kindle purchase on Amazon.com. It takes about 2 hours to read in a single sitting.
Overview
The book has 11 chapters, with the naming of each chapter not at all relevant to the chapter's content, so I'm not going to list them here.
The book can be broken into three sections based on my reading:
- Backstory of the author's trading and his first exposure to straddles
- Several stories and examples of his straddles and strangles in action around Fed moves
- The author trying to sell his VIP service
Critique
The book began with a (too) long introduction to how Morris first heard of a straddle. It goes downhill from there.
The writing is adequate -- not funny, not serious -- with a very "ebook" tone. As an avid reader, I'm comfortable saying that Morris included a lot of "filler material" in this book to expand the size. In reality, he could have consolidated this to roughly 50% the current size and perhaps had a better, more readable book. Instead, the page length vs. actual content results in poor execution.
For experienced options traders, this is not a technical book that will provide you with a deeper understanding of the statistical outcomes of various trade setups. For the new options trader, this book also doesn't provide a good foundation. Instead, the book revolves almost entirely around Morris' single trade setup: buying straddles/strangles to capture potential implied volatility (IV) expansion around gold after Fed meetings.
On the topic of IV: One thing that I quickly noticed was that Morris avoided using the term for almost the entire book. In fact, as somebody that has traded options for quite a while, I had to piece together in the first few chapters that Morris almost exclusively plays vega by going long on straddles/strangles in the runup to a Fed announcement, looking for a larger gold move post-meeting. This is not a bad trading setup in itself -- when IV is low, I often look for setups for long calendar spreads, a short ratio spread here and there, and other approaches to capture IV expansion. However, the struggle here is that this setup seems to be his one-trick pony in the book.
In the final few chapters, Morris finally mentions "IV," at which point I had a heavy sigh of relief. It was like watching an episode of a show where they leave you on a cliffhanger. You know what's going to happen, but you need to see it unfold -- and apparently seeing the letters I-V does that here.
If Morris reads this, I would recommend strengthening the book by renaming it "Straddles/Strangles for Fed Meetings: Return of the Vega" reducing the content specific to that topic, and ensuring the technical concepts, and their terms, are actually introduced and properly used. That would be a decent book.
Rating
Strongly Recommended (for beginners to early intermediate)
Recommended
Not Recommended
