Call: Who can help me with stocks with options and futures?

Dear Gerard,

Don't get into futures or options if you don't know anything about them. If you really want to do something in options, let us advise you. For futures, one should also keep a decent margin. Profits and losses are tracked on a daily basis and settled on the basis of the closing price of the futures contract. It is advisable to keep extra account balance as the future is settled every day. In the event of a loss, the shortage of margin must be cleared immediately.
Futures are highly speculative and an investor should not trade futures unless they are in a position to suffer a potentially significant financial loss.

Msgr.

Monique

Gerard, http://www.optiecursus.com is a good way to master the basics of options. You will then receive a weekly email (for 24 weeks) after which you will know how Call and Put options work.
The course is even completely free. If you want to delve further into this matter, the Option Strategies e-book is also recommended. See http://optiecursus.com/optiestrategieen.htm
My advice: start with the free 24-week course first.
Sincerely, Joseph

If my English is reasonably good, then the book “Option Pricing and Volatility” by Sheldon Nathenburg is highly recommended.

The most complicated thing about options is pricing. Because your premium is made up of different legs, such as expected volatility and duration. This is done through the Black & Scholes model.

As a trader you have to master that, otherwise you can sometimes be faced with very nasty surprises. The simple option constructions are often discussed in investment books, but the more professional traders do not look at them.

Furthermore, you do not need margin when buying options, but you do need margin when you write. Many brokers also require you to have a special account, a margin account.

Stocks and index options also have differences (American vs European), for example, you can exercise a stock option prematurely and not an index option, etc.

Futures is fairly straight forward, but it really depends on the underlying value, is that a commodity? Then I have to act differently than with an index future, for example. As someone already mentioned, futures are settled every day on the basis of the underlying asset and you must also maintain margin. That often differs, you have an initial margin that you must have available on the day itself, and a maintenace margin that you must have available if you hold your positions overnight.

With futures you also have to deal with a price curve, so-called contango (futures more expensive the longer the term is) and backwardation (future cheaper than the spot price). For example, a future on the VIX (index indicating expected volatility) index, when spot is high they are usually in backwardation while at low VIX they are back in contango, purely because traders expect low volatility not to last.

Similarly with oil futures, if there is a lot of short-term demand, they are slightly in backwardation, while with stable demand they are normally slightly in contango.

Futures pricing is actually very simple, spot price of underlying + interest – cost of storage.

But it sometimes varies, with an index future, for example, you do not have any costs for storage, but dividends are deducted from that. So for an index future it is index + interest – dividend.

Bit futures you should actually first know what you want to trade and then look at how the future works.

It is also very well possible to combine both into 1 position, for example index options and index futures. For example, most traders in Aex index options hedge their options position with index futures if they trade delta neutral and only want the premium.

It's all just a little bit what you want. For example, you can use options in many ways, to hedge your shares, to trade directionally with leverage, to trade only option premium, to all kinds of abstract constructions that give you an advantage in both price and change of expected volatility.

It is both a difficult matter and if you go into it a little deeper it becomes very abstract.

I live in Khon Kaen myself and I sometimes want to explain something, but I don't know to what extent that is nearby.