Finding the Best Options Trading Course

As you embark on your journey into the world of options investing, you’ll quickly discover the difference between comprehensive educational opportunities and uninspired promotional content lacking substance or information. Record Options Investing (ROI) is here to guide you on that journey.

What is a Retail Investor?

For those unfamiliar with the term, a retail investor is a person investing in securities via a bank, brokerage house, or other established entity, though this individual does not trade stocks, futures, options, etc. in a professional capacity. For example, let’s say you open a brokerage account through TD Ameritrade to trade on the stock market. That activity makes you a retail investor.

The “retail investor” definition encompasses so many different people: soon-to-be retirees, young adults considering big-ticket expenses, and parents saving for their children’s education costs (just to name a few). As a retail investor, you have responsibilities in your life other than managing your investment portfolio like a family, job, and house. That’s why most retail investors stick to the recommendations offered by their money managers without ever expanding their financial literacy or knowledge of Wall Street. This is a common mistake people make and, unfortunately, they are the ones who see lower returns on investments and higher risk.

At ROI, we work exclusively with retail investors. That’s because we are retail investors. We started our journey into the world of options investing decades ago because we wanted to determine the best methods to save for big purchases, our children’s education, and retirement. We’ve been in your shoes, and we found ourselves wanting more than any person or product could provide in the ways of comprehensive options education. Everyone was eager to regurgitate the basics to us but no one seemed willing to get into the nitty gritty details of making our investment lucrative and worthwhile.

So how can a new or experienced retail investor like you build your financial literacy, manage your risk, and make your capital work for you in a meaningful way? By exploring all of the available educational opportunities, from signing up for related news alerts to completing a comprehensive options trading course, such as the one offered through ROI’s one-of-a-kind platform.

Why Do People Enroll in an Options Trading Course?

The primary reason individuals look into option education courses is they want to uncover easy-to-execute methods for managing risk while accumulating wealth. But what leads a retail investor to enroll in an options trading course? There could be any number of motivators that inspire a person to take control of their finances.

If you’re reading this blog post, you probably looked at some interesting numbers recently. Maybe you’re planning to retire in the near future. But you, like nearly half of all Americans, are concerned that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your ability to achieve a secure retirement. You could also find yourself among the 67 percent that now plan to retire later due to the pandemic. Or possibly you’ve had to rethink plans due to COVID-19 just like 33 percent of people nearing retirement. It only makes sense that you’re looking for an ally in the world of Wall Street investing that can offer a comprehensive options trading course.

Maybe you were researching investment opportunities and additional ways to cover the costs of your child’s higher education. You’d be in good company, as the average cost to attend college in the United States has tripled over the last 20 years to an average of $35,720 per student per year. Parents looking to enroll their children in private education institutions starting in kindergarten and through high school can plan to pay an average of $291,404 per student before writing a single check to a college or university. Sure, there’s lower-cost education options available but you want the best for your children and their futures. That’s only natural.

There’s also some staggering numbers to consider for people looking to buy new homes. Single-family home prices jumped by 19.7 percent between July 2020 and July 2021, the biggest increase in more than three decades. Despite the astronomically high prices of homes across the country in every major metropolitan area, sellers are receiving dozens of bids and choosing those offering the highest price in cash. For example, second home buyers and real estate investors accounted for 41 percent of home sales in Phoenix, Arizona, 36 percent in Las Vegas, and 34 percent in Tampa, Florida.

All of these numbers add up to one conclusion: to ensure you’re getting the most from your life, you’ll need to find a minimally risky method for investing existing assets to build larger bank accounts. So what is that method? That all depends on who you ask. But since you’ve come to The Options Trading Lab, you’ve probably heard about the potential profits you can generate investing in options.

Can You Learn Options Trading on Reddit?

We included this question here because so many people search for the answer on Google. At the beginning of 2021, options trading made headlines around the world when a group of Reddit users earned a lot of money on GameStop (GME) options contracts. Seemingly overnight, regular Joes were posting serious gains on Reddit, sharing screenshots of their overflowing bank accounts, leading everyone to think they could easily reproduce these results. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know how they could cash in on what a small group of people were able to accomplish in this very singular instance.

To demonstrate how eager retail investors were to follow in Reddit users’ footsteps, we examined the numbers on Google Trends. We researched the popularity of the search term options trading from January 1 to March 31, 2021. The search term hit peak popularity (a score of 100) on January 28, 2021. This is the same date that GME’s stock price hit an all-time high of $483.

Four weeks prior to that when the year began on January 1, 2021, the popularity score for that same search term was only 15. And four weeks after January 28, on February 25, 2021, the popularity score for options trading plummeted to 38. By March 31, 2021, the popularity score tanked at 22.

Just check out this Google Trend graph for search phrase “options trading” during the GME short squeze of 2021.

What is important to understand is that the people that made all of that money during the GME squeeze did not learn the complexities of options investing on Reddit. They used the social media site to communicate with others about their plans to squeeze the GME stock but Reddit was not the platform where they learned what a squeeze was, let alone how to manage this incredibly risky investment strategy.

Furthermore, many of the Reddit users that initially bragged about their gains from the GME squeeze ended up losing so much they found themselves in debt to the brokerage firms where they made their initial trades. Yes, some people generated incredible returns on their investments but the knowledge to make that money did not come from Reddit because that site was not designed as a platform for investment education. It’s intended as a social media site, which is crucial to keep in mind as you explore sources about options investing.

Where to Learn Options Trading

As you might have surmised at this point, Record Options Investing's 14-Day Option Investor course is a dynamic options trading education. But, believe it or not, we strongly encourage ROI users to use other articles, videos, webinars, websites, news sources, and so on that offer options investing information. There’s nothing wrong with having too much information. In fact, gathering information is an essential piece to building your financial literacy and familiarity with Wall Street.

Ultimately, what you’ll discover as you build your understanding with the options investing arena, is that there’s learning about options and learning the complexities of investing in options. It wouldn’t take us very long to explain to you the basics of an options contract, a call vs. a put, expiration dates, and naked vs. covered trades. You can also get that information from any free options trading video course you watch on YouTube or the choices on sale from retailers like Udemy.

There’s plenty of self-proclaimed geniuses out there hawking their options education products. A lot of times these personalities offer to teach you about options for free if you buy their book or attend an event, neither of which makes the world of options investing any easier to understand. What you get in return from these hucksters is a dumbed-down explanation of options trading basics rather than the comprehensive education required to intelligently invest in options.

We were once just like you: trying to learn about options investing. For years, we educated ourselves about options. We started our journey in the same place you did, with little knowledge and a thirst to know more. The more we consumed other resources, the more we were left wanting to further our education.

Ultimately, we found that most financial “experts” sell a simplified version of something very complex. They fail to really teach the information in a way where students could apply their knowledge successfully. Instead they summarize these concepts, explaining them as vocabulary words and rather than strategies for investing wisely.

To invest in options successfully, you need to know the nitty gritty details about timing your trades, the Greeks, and the nuances of trade platforms like Thinkorswim. Most importantly, you must clearly comprehend the risk management methods necessary for protecting your investments while still building capital.

Learn about options wherever you can, whether it’s from reading books, watching educational videos, attending seminars, or practicing trades in a simulated trading account. However, don’t make a single live trade until you’ve found an educational platform that teaches you:

1. What is an option and its components?

2. Investment strategies driven by risk management principles

3. How to put your knowledge into action successfully

Should I Pay for an Options Trading Course?

There are plenty of compelling reasons to spend the money on an options investing course. But why should someone pay for a course when there’s free ones available? At Record Options Investing, we encourage everyone to explore every resource available about options investing. Knowledge is power. It never hurts to improve your financial literacy.

However, you should know that you get what you pay for with free or low-cost options trading classes. Many of these virtual offerings fail to provide users with the ongoing support,  resources, and insights that educational platforms make available.

Additionally, free video tutorials about options trading lack much of the Wall Street knowledge required to invest with limited risk. Sure, they’ll explain what an option, call, and put are, and maybe even go into the details about how an options trade works. But investing in options requires more than submitting a call or put order. You need to truly understand each component of the trade so you don’t lose your investment or end up in debt.

Make no mistake, investing in options without a full knowledge of doing so can result in sizable losses that will leave you with a negative account balance that the bank will do everything in its power to collect on before you get to make any other investments. Why risk such drastic consequences because you only opted for free options courses?

Before you invest a single dollar in the stock market, you need a robust course like Record Options Investing's 14-Day Option Investor. Increase your financial literacy with our comprehensive, premier knowledge base complete with education courses, investment calculators, expert insights, ongoing support, and so much more. Before you know it, you’ll be investing intelligently to generate impressive returns with minimal risk.

How Much Time is Needed to Learn about Options Investing?

Every person has a different timeline of confidence as they develop their personal knowledge base about investing in options. It may only take a week for you to learn the basic terms and phrases used in options investing. But it could take months to become confident enough in your understanding of options investing mechanisms to submit your first live trade.

Confidence in investing is essential. Whether you’re investing in baseball cards, comic books, or options, you need an intimate knowledge of your market and the investment strategies specific to your area of expertise. With options investing, you not only need a complete understanding of these trade strategies, you also want an intimate knowledge of companies you plan to invest in when you buy or sell options contracts. It’s easy to put in an order for a call in Amazon but knowing the risk, how to cover your trade, how to time your exit, and how to further invest the returns is a completely different level of education. You won’t get it with a free options trading course.

As Albert Einstein said, “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” So the real challenge for a company like Record Options Investing is to explain the complexities of options investing so that retail investors feel confident enough to manage their capital and risk while generating consistent returns.

We’re not geniuses. We’re retail investors just like you. After years of learning, researching, and investing, we developed our own options investing strategies and saw consistent long-term results that changed our futures. It was then we realized how long it took us to get to that point (literally, decades). That forced us to consider all the other people out there just like us looking for information necessary to learn these skills. That’s how Record Options Investing was born.

Discover the power of consistent returns with our 14-Day Option Investor course now.