You've probably heard many opinions as to which option strategies are the best: Covered calls are best because they reduce the risk but still allow for a profit. Naked puts are the best because you're getting paid to buy stock. Straddles are the best because they allow you to make money whether the market is going up or down. If you've been trading options for a while, you no doubt have heard many others. But, when you hear comments such as these, all you're hearing are opinions of one trader's preference for a particular risk-reward profile. In order to really understand option trading, you need to understand that all option strategies come with their own sets of risks and rewards and the market will price them accordingly. Be careful of anyone telling you that a particular strategy is superior to another; they either do not fully understand options or are trying to sell you something.

You are standing in the airport terminal of Your Life, and the jet plane departing for the 21st century is about to take off. You must make a choice: Do you remain in the terminal, eating the stale vending-machine food of outmoded thinking? Or do you get on the plane and soar into the stratosphere of trading computerization, swept along by the jet stream of evolving technology? Do you enjoy the in-flight snack of virtually unlimited information access, secure in the knowledge that when you encounter the inevitable turbulence of rapid market fluctuations, you are holding, in this book, the "automatic pilot" of expert advice and guidance? That is the vision of tomorrow that I am offering you. Let's explore together this amazing new cyberworld of science and trading. If you don't know about these latest advances in science and trading, have no fear. I'm not going to bombard you with technical gobbledygook.

You also goes to Dave Lowdon of Logical Systems Inc. for programming support and to Mark Wiemeler and Ken McGahan for the charts presented in the book. Thanks are also due to graduate assistants Daniel Snyder and V. Anand for their untiring efforts. Special thanks are due to John Oleson for introducing me to chart-based risk and reward estimation techniques. My debt to these individuals parallels the enormous debt I owe to Dean Olga Engelhardt for encouraging me to write the book and Associate Dean Kathleen Carlson for providing valuable administrative support. My chairperson, Professor C. T. Chen, deserves special commendation for creating an environment conducive to thinking and writing. I also
wish to thank the Northeastern Illinois University Foundation for its generous support of my research endeavors.

Whether you know it or not, you have been trading commodities all your life. Sure, you may have never traded a contract of Pork Bellies, but you have almost certainly traded a possession like a car, house, or antique for someone else's money or possession. If you have never done that, for sure you have traded time for money. You have traded your time as a teacher, lawyer, pipe fitter, or ditchdigger for someone else's money. So, you are halfway there. you just never knew it! When we trade our time, we are actually trading our time plus our skills. That is why a brain surgeon gets more per hour than a knee surgeon. That is also why an outstanding quarterback gets more than a tackle and surgeon combined. He has a greater career risk. It is not that one skill is inherently more valuable than the other, it is that one is more difficult to come by and carries higher risk.

Of necessity, our text has evolved along with the financial markets. In the Fifth Edition, we address many of the changes in the investment environment.
At the same time, many basic principles remain important. We believe that attention to these few important principles can simplify the study of otherwise difficult material and that fundamental principles should organize and motivate all study. These principles are crucial to understanding the securities already traded in financial markets and in understanding new securities that will be introduced in the future. For this reason, we have made this book thematic, meaning we never offer rules of thumb without reference to the central tenets of the modern approach to finance. The common theme unifying this book is that security markets are nearly efficient, meaning most securities are usually priced appropriately given their risk and return attributes.

After we have set out the objectives for an investment, considered the challenges to reaching them, developed a strategy with the optimal chance of
meeting our goals, allocated assets to asset classes and managers, and purchased the securities to build our portfolios, the next step is to check the
results. Investment performance measurement is the quantification of the
results achieved by an investment program. This book describes and demonstrates the techniques we use to measure investment performance. Performance measures are statistics summarizing the rates of return achieved, estimates of the risk taken, and measures of the skill evidenced by the efficient use of risk. Once we have measured performance we are interested in measuring the contributions made by the securities, industries, asset classes, and other portfolio segments to the absolute and benchmark relative returns achieved.

As investors, you have all been on the receiving end of sales pitches from brokers, friends and investment advisors about stocks that they claim will deliver spectacular returns. These stories not only sound persuasive and reasonable but are also backed up by evidence - anecdotal, in some cases, and statistical, in others - that the strategies work. When you try to implement them for your investments, though, you seldom can match their success on paper. All to often, you end up with buyer?s remorse, poorer for the experience and promising yourselves that you will not fall for the allure of these stories again. All too often, you forget the lessons of past mistakes and are easy prey for the next big stock story. While there are literally hundreds of schemes to beat the market in circulation, they are all variants of about a dozen basic themes that have been around for as long as there have been stocks to buy and sell.

This publication is for short-term traders, i.e. for traders who hold stocks for one to eight days. Short-term trading assumes buying and selling stocks often. After two to four months a trader will have good statistics and he or she can start an analysis of trading results. What are the main questions, which should be answered from this analysis? Consider two hypothetical trading strategies. Suppose you use half of your trading capital to buy stocks selected by your secret system and sell them on the next day. The other half of your capital you use to sell short some specific stocks and close positions on the next day. Which strategy is better and how can the trading capital be divided between these strategies in order to obtain the maximal profit with minimal risk? These are typical trader's questions and we will outline methods of solving them and similar problems.

It was in the issue of May 25, 1959, that Time Magazine devoted almost a full page in its Business Section to the extraordinary stock-market story of a dancer— Nicolas Darvas. Time told how this complete non-professional, ". . . who ignores tips, financial stories and brokers' letters," was able to make himself a millionaire several times over through the investment methods he developed. This article raised a lot of eyebrows among Wall Streeters who were shocked by Mr. Darvas’ disregard for many of the long-accepted, ordinary investment practices to which they were accustomed. But it also fired the interest and imagination of thousands of investors across the country. We at the American research council, publishers of many of the most widely-used and authoritative investment and business guides, were also impressed by Time's brief outline of Mr. Darvas' successful investment methods. As a result, we decided to approach Mr. Darvas about writing a book describing his techniques.

You are about to begin a journey into the science of investment analysis. Many of you may think that using the word science to describe the activities of Wall Street is a misnomer. Luck, chance, or voodoo are probably closer to your explanation of investment activity. I hope to convince you otherwise. As you make this journey, it should become obvious that investment analysis and its related extensions are rigorous enough to be taken as an actual science. Like other scientific disciplines, investment analysis requires a working knowledge of its basic concepts. Part One explores these concepts, with considerable emphasis on exercises that hone awareness, expertise, and understanding of this once arcane subject. A century ago, the task of investment counseling belonged to men of prudence who, for fear of being wrong, usually invested funds with guaranteed returns and did not rely on scientific discipline. The fear of not being beyond reproach—otherwise known as ''reputation fear"—provided enough guidance for these men.