Reddit mentions of Trading Options as a Professional: Techniques for Market Makers and Experienced Traders

I've never really looked at (or heard of) gamma-neutral trading as a strategy. You can only pick up gamma from other options, so (if we keep the example) you'd be buying options on the way down, I guess? Buying the call at 80 strike would neutralize our gamma from the 80 short put, but that's not really the point of the risk-reversal.


I think it's important to not get tripped up on the wording of different strategies. Gamma neutral ≠ Delta Neutral trading, but Delta neutral can = gamma scalping.

There are some great examples in this book and an article from volcube

Bookmark these sites: theOCC, which is the clearing organization for all US option exchanges. A part of their mission is to provide education to market participants and the public about all the products they clear. For example, if you go to the Publications page, you'll be able to view the by-laws, rules, and the publication for The Characteristics & Risks of Standardized Options that every broker will send you when you open an account. You might as well get a head-start and do some reading.

I would start here... OptionAlpha video tracks. Definitely watch the entire beginner track. You may or may not have to sign up, but it's free. His videos are hosted on YouTube, but I like his site better because he orders them in a logical sequence and replies to comments, unlike the unordered playlists on YouTube.

OptionsPlaybook for visualizing the profit and loss of different strategies. As a beginner, just focus on understanding long calls, long puts, short calls, short puts, and defined risk strategies like call spreads, put spreads, iron condors (basically a defined-risk strangle), iron butterfly (basically a defined-risk straddle), etc.

Alongside that, any options book that gives a good overview in a logical sequence. I see a lot of recommendations for something like McMillan. You can look at some of the bestsellers here or view other Reddit suggestions.

Doing is definitely better than just reading, so find yourself a trading platform that has a paper (fake) money feature, like thinkorswim. The guy that does the OptionAlpha videos uses TOS, so it's easy to follow along, and there are lots of learning videos on the web.

I bookmarked this subreddit with it sorted by newest submissions and read it everyday. The sub activity provides for a few new posts per day, which makes it manageable enough to still keep up with reading all the new comments on a daily basis.

For topics I want to find more info on, I do a Google search like this: learn options site:reddit.com/r/options. I find it to work better than using Reddit's own search.

More in-depth reading like I see a lot of recommendations for Natenburg. I've also read this book, which has a lot of in-depth graphs on the Greeks and time to expiration, etc. and helped me understand why people recommend certain parameters for strategies. There's a lot of interesting things in that book that I enjoyed learning about, but like the title, several chapters don't apply for retail trading in the amounts that I'm trading.

Timeline for understanding?.