Trading Online  |  MAR 2009

Full Service by Moses Sanchez

Full Service by Moses Sanchez It’s nice to have a hand to hold when you are confused about the market. The way many traders do when they are starting out, I went to a “free” workshop on options and trading when I first got interested in the markets. Once there, they offered to teach me to trade for a fee I could not afford. Undaunted, I figured I could learn the lessons they offered just by visiting my local library. So I did: I started reading what was available there to feed my own interest about the wonderful world of stocks, options, and commodities. After much study, I decided I was ready to start trading options by using a combination of methods that would (theoretically) make me the money I wanted. So I asked my broker at the time, T Rowe Price, for permission to trade options in my brokerage account. I knew what I wanted to do but actually doing it right was more difficult than I expected. Was I supposed to “buy to open” or “buy to close,” and what was “fill or kill”? Abbreviations such as FOK, IOC, and GTC made absolutely no sense to me, since the books I had read didn’t explain the actual process of trading options very thoroughly. All my research on the companies I wanted to try new strategies with was the least of my worries, because I couldn’t even put the trade on!

by Moses Sanchez