It shows how much the option price has risen or fallen since the previous day's close.īid The Bid price is the price that a buyer is willing to pay for that particular stock option. Be aware that this transaction could have been minutes, days, or weeks ago, and may not reflect the current market price.Ĭhange (Chg) The fourth column lists the change in the options price. It's the price at which the transaction took place. Last The third column lists the last price at which an option was traded (was opened or closed). The symbol identifies 4 things: which stock this option belongs to, what the strike price is, what month it expires in, and if it is a call or a put option. "MVLLE.X" is the ticker symbol for the 09 December 25 call option. Symbol The second column lists all of the different ticker/trading symbols for each stock option. The strike/exercise price of an option is the "price" at which the stock will be bought or sold when the option is exercised. Strike The first column lists all of the different strike prices of the stock that you can trade. Depending on which option chain you are looking at, the call options may be listed above the put options or sometimes the calls and puts are listed side-by-side. I like to give myself plenty of time for the trade to work out so I always try to look at options that expire 2-6 months from the current date.Ĭalls Options and Put Options Each stock option chain will list out all the call options and all the put options for the particular stock. Some traders want to stay in a trade 1 week, some want to stay in a trade 2 months, so your trading plan will dictate which month you look at. For our example we are looking at all the call and put options that expire the 3rd week of December 2009. Let's use a snippet of the stock option chain listed above, which is a Yahoo stock option chain of the stock symbol "MV":Įxpiration Months As you can see from the picture there are several different expiration months listed horizontally across the top of the option chain (Aug 09, Sep 09, Dec 09, etc.). They all essentially have the same information displayed, but look completely different. If you go to Yahoo, MSN, CBOE, or your brokerage account and pull up an option quote, you will notice that the layout of each of their option chains is completely different. Part of the confusion in understanding option chains is that every option chain looks different. This begins Step 4: The Stock Option Chain. After you've found a potential trade, you look over the option chain and pre-select the option you're going to buy or sell.This process is used to find potential trades ( Step 3). You've used a bit of stock trend analysis to review your stock charts on a daily or weekly basis.
You've looked at the stock charts of those stocks and if you like what you see you add it to your stock watch list until you reach a list size of 50-100 stocks ( Step 2).You've used the Investor's Business Daily (IBD) to find a list of good stocks to buy ( Step 1).
Nvda yahoo fnance stoc opton chan how to#
All that easy-to-understand information suddenly gets lost in translation and you're left looking at a table full of numbers and symbols that make absolutely no sense at all.īefore you learn how to read an option chain, let's do a quick recap of the 7 step trading process thus far:
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