Options Laboratory with the textbook, A Course in Options, costs just $89.95 plus $7.00 shipping and handling in the U.S.A., $12.00 s/h for international orders. Click here to download a limited trial version.
Options Laboratory was created, designed and priced to compete with books. Too many people buy several over-written option books for $50.00 each, only to find themselves frustrated by the math, overwhelmed by detail, and unable to clearly envision how their option strategies will behave. They start trading without adequate tools, get hurt, and give up.
We like to describe Options Laboratory as software with a book rather than a book with some software. Many books include free software, which generally is worth what you pay for it: badly designed and hard to use, or a time-restricted come-on version intended to sell you a more expensive package.
Options Laboratory will accurately model any strategy that can be constructed with an underlying good and up to four different option contracts. For European-style options it uses the Black-Scholes model; for American-style options, a variation of the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein binomial model. Both models allow either "lump" or continuous dividend corrections.
With Options Laboratory, you can see the answers to questions like these:
The answers are usually not obvious, and getting them right can make a big, big difference in your trading results. With tools and understanding, you can do much better than simply guessing. Options Laboratory uses advanced statistical and modeling methods to deliver easy-to-interpret visual and graphical answers to questions like these -- in dollar terms, for the actual trades you set up.
Of course, it handles all the option basics simply and naturally. For instance, as soon as you enter a contract by choosing its strike price and expiration with the mouse, the option's fair value is instantly displayed. As you move the scroll bar representing the stock's estimated volatility, the fair value tracks the changing volatility. Implied volatility is immediately calculated from an option's market price.
For combination positions, you can graph the performance of the individual options on the same chart with the combined position, and "read out" values by clicking graph points with the mouse.
All analyses can be animated to show how results will evolve as time passes, including the "Greek" parameters. There's no better way to get a feeling for what's going to happen with your strategy. And you can see results on a per-share basis, or in share-weighted numbers that reflect your actual gain or loss in dollars.
Options Laboratory also has some very advanced features. For instance, you can take into account an expected trend in the price of the underlying stock or index. Basic option pricing formulas are "drift-neutral" -- they assume the stock price has noise (volatility) but no directional trend. We've integrated trend analysis into the mathematical models for you. You just set a scroll bar to indicated the expected price trend rate, up or down.
If you write puts, another feature you'll appreciate is seeing the early-exercise threshhold price flagged on your graphs. Early exercise of American-style options is not an arbitrary decision; it only makes economic sense in certain very specific situations. Options Laboratory can calculate and indicate the price where it becomes attractive to exercise an option before expiration. You can use this knowledge to close out positions before they move too far into early exercise territory.
Follow this link for downloading and installation instructions, or this one for an article illustrating strategy analysis with Options Laboratory.
Options Laboratory with the textbook, A Course in Options, costs just $89.95 plus $7.00 shipping and handling in the U.S.A., $12.00 s/h for international orders.
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