Profit with Options: Essential Methods for Investing Success

This book could probably be considered the Chevy in McMillan's fleet, with McMillan on Options and Options as a Strategic Investment standing as the Cadillac and Corvette, respectively. It's a worthwhile addition, but if you're new to McMillan, you'd probably be better-served by one of his more well-known works. This is a relatively short book that provides some tools for using options as direct or contrary indicators, and actual strategies for employing options to profit off expected movement in price or volatility. The book also provides some good guidelines for evaluating indicators like the put/call ratio (index and equity-only), VIX (old VIX, now VXO), and how to interpret volume in an options chain for possible signs of predictive insider trading. Later chapters get a little more complicated, covering some strategies for volatility buying and selling, etc. The "workbook" end of this volume is rather thin, basically comprised of 12-20 questions at the end of every chapter covering what you've learned, with an answer index in back. If you're a McMillan fan or new to options, you'll probably like this book. Otherwise, check into his better-known volumes first.

This is the fourth book on options that I have read.I learned a lot from the 2 chapters on using options as indicators to spot insider trading activity and the chapter on volatility.The chapter on using options as insurance will help me teach my family the bare minimum of what every stock investor should know about options.The chapter on System Trading was useless to me.One "feature" of this book that irritated me at first is that the "Review Questions" after each chapter quiz the reader on information that wasn't covered. However, I quickly got over this minor irritation because the answers are useful new information. The section is simply mis-labled. It should be called "Relevant Questions" or "Frequently Asked Questions". At any rate, I used up an entire highlighter pen and that is good indicator that this book is worthwhile.One other minor nit-pick; the copyright date is 2002 but the examples are from 1999 and 2000 (pre bubble-burst). There are also a few references to "the video" which leads me to belive that this book is a collection of previously written reports. That's fine because the chapters are self-contained but the editor should have deleted the reference to "the video".Overall I give it 4 stars.Thank you to the author.

This volume continues the work of the author's two previous tomes on options. The author states this work answers questions raised by readers of his first two books. If you liked his previous work, this book is for you. If you are just getting started with options, there are other books for the beginner, including THE SHORT BOOK ON OPTIONS or GETTING STARTED WITH OPTIONS