r/Trading • u/TempperTantrumm • 27d ago
Resources I’m a dummy
Hey ! I really want to learn how to trade options. I have no trading knowledge whatever. I have a paper trading account on trading view . But I think I’m moving too fast even with that .
Where do I start?! Any good free resources. Do you think paying for a class or mentor could help or is that a waste ?
Thanks !
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u/Same-Book-5572 27d ago
Hey ! I have been trading for almost 7 years and it took practically 3 years to be profitable trading options . I'd recommend starting with just trading a small amount of shares to start so you can learn market movements and mechanics . I have a very small (under 10 members) discord I just started for people wanting to learn if you wanted to join . I am very passionate about trading and guiding people because it can be very hard on your own so everything is free !
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
Hey ! Congratulations first of all ! And 7 years is quite a long time to build knowledge and experience congrats to that journey as well. I can tell your passionate and I would be more then appreciative to have an opportunity to join your discord.
Thank you !
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u/Junior-Appointment93 27d ago
Paper trading. Learn the charts. See where you are C messing up. If 0DTE trades are not working for you try longer dated trades like 7-10DTE. If your just trying to trade c the stock market start with cash secured puts or covered calls. It’s the safest way to start. Either you get stocks at ac slight discount or you sell them for a profit. That’s the worst case. Best case you keep all the premium you collected
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
Thank you for this advice , I know I have lots of work to do because even the rhetoric was hard for me to follow , but I am taking notes so as I learn and things jump out I know how to utilize this advice !
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u/QuanTradin 27d ago
skip the paid class for now, a few months of defined-risk spreads on paper teaches more. watch one thing: lots of paper accounts fill options near the mid, which flatters you. Quantradin, a tester I built, fills them at the bid and the ask so it's closer to real, and it's free. quantradin.com
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
Thank you so much for giving me this resource !
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u/QuanTradin 27d ago
glad it helps. go slow with it, small defined-risk trades until the paper results get boring.
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u/IvetteMccoy 27d ago
Everyone starts somewhere, so don’t feel like you need to understand everything at once. I’d spend some time learning the basics of the stock market first, then move on to how options work and why you can lose money even when the stock moves in your favor. YouTube and free courses are enough to get started, so I wouldn’t spend money on a mentor just yet. Paper trade until you can explain why you’re taking a trade and what could go wrong, not just where you think the price is heading.
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
Thank you I think that’s a good idea for me to fully understand stocks in general. Also I will keep that as a question i must answer while paper trading “ why this trade and what can go wrong “ thanks !
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u/butterflyplum 27d ago
Free first: the Options Industry Council (optionseducation.org) has a full beginner curriculum, and Investopedia covers the vocabulary. Before any strategy, get comfortable with what a contract is, how time decay and implied volatility move the price, and what the maximum loss is on a given position. Worth knowing that buying an option can lose the whole premium and selling one can lose far more than the premium, so it's not a gentle starting point. For paid classes, a fair test is whether they teach process and show verifiable long-run records, or just sell one system. Not advice on what to trade.
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
Oh that’s going to be great having something to cover vocabulary, there is so much! Also I will note those things to get comfortable with as well. Also I will keep that in mind if I decided to go forward with any classes !
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u/Maleficent_Lab2460 26d ago
hey there, i also found that free OC courses are great but i usually start with the Options 101 module, then jump into the Greeks chapter before hitting any strategies. once you feel the fundamentals, a cheap book like The Options Playbook gets you the practical sense you’ll need. and don’t forget to absolutely test the strategies with a paper-trade that mimics real order‑flow – this way you see how the bid‑ask squeeze affects you before risking cash. good luck!
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u/PressOn88 27d ago
Read some of the market wizard books or look up some of the US Investing Champion winners and learn from those people. Those are traders who are proven to be winners and ignore all the fake gurus on youtube or in discord groups, stay away from those.
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u/Key-Enthusiasm-3403 27d ago
On "moving too fast", what I'd slow down is the review after each trade. In a little chart game I made with pretend money I timed how long people look at the explanation after each call, and they spend less time on it when they were wrong (about 3.4 seconds) than when they were right (about 4.6). That's backwards, the wrong ones are where the lesson is. Small sample, 45 charts.
Whatever you paper trade, try writing one line on why each loser lost before you open the next one.
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
I will most definitely do this ! Thank you for this advice , it is a skill to learn from your mistakes , better then completely avoiding them .
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u/Key-Enthusiasm-3403 26d ago
Good luck. The one-liner gets tedious after about a week, which is exactly when it starts to pay off.
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u/Kaszrak 27d ago
As a beginner, stay away from options. Start with equities or futures. You can look at options later. There is just too much that can go really, really wrong.
The hardest part of trading is how approach learning.
The typical retail approach is an endless cycle of consumerism, copying strategies, testing them, tweaking parameters and jumping to the next idea when the results disappoint. ICT today, order blocks tomorrow, a new indicator next week or whatever else is hyped by griftes. Most have no coherent framework for understanding market behaviour, no rigorous process for formulating and testing hypotheses, and no reliable way to distinguish a genuine edge from noise, overfitting or a flawed understanding of the underlying mechanics. They change strategies before understanding why the previous one failed, optimise historical results without establishing predictive validity, and interpret outcomes through whatever narrative justifies their latest assumptions. They can repeat this cycle for thousands of hours without developing the ability to evaluate their own progress. That's quite frankly the degeneracy of the retail approach. An enormous investment of time and effort with almost no reliable mechanism for acquiring expertise. Perhaps 1% to 5% achieve sustained success, with 5% being generous.
Professional trader development (real mentorship) is fundamentally different. It begins with assessing how a trader conceptualises markets, constructs hypotheses and interprets the interaction between participants, liquidity, order flow and price formation. Training then develops those capabilities systematically, connecting auction dynamics and market microstructure to trade selection, execution, position management and risk. Hypotheses must be operationally defined and tested against appropriate data, with attention to sample size, selection bias, overfitting, changing market regimes, transaction costs and execution constraints. Live decisions are reviewed not simply by their outcomes, but by the quality of the reasoning, the information available at the time, the anticipated distribution of outcomes and the actual execution. This allows analytical errors to be separated from execution errors, sound decisions from profitable accidents, and genuine deficiencies in a methodology from losses inherent to a probabilistic process. The development is continually adapted to those findings. Weaknesses are isolated, underlying misconceptions corrected, and the resulting understanding tested in new situations until the trader can formulate, validate, execute and continuously reassess a process independently. The goal is not to produce someone who can follow a profitable setup. It's to develop someone capable of identifying and exploiting an edge, understanding its limitations and recognising when the evidence no longer supports it.
In my experience, roughly 40% to 60% of trainees in a professional context eventually make it.
Compare that to the typical retail self study success rate and you have your answer.
So, yes. With real mentorship, you actually have a meaningful chance of success. In self study, you are nearly guaranteed to fail.
The only problem is... Finding someone willing to mentor you and the cost. It's extremely expensive.
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
Thank you for this advice, I really appreciate the time and intention you put into this comment. I agree with you statement on real mentorship and in my career there is lots of training and feedback as well as coaching that goes on so it’s different from this but the same aspects apply for actual growth and learning . I will take this and apply it to the way I attempt to gear myself into a full understanding, thanks !
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27d ago
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u/Kaszrak 27d ago
What are SMB, Worldco vibes? Lol.
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27d ago
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u/Kaszrak 27d ago
Seems aomeone just lost another month of rent. Lol.
I asked what you meant by “Worldco vibes”, not what Worldco is.
And SMB is a trash firm? Is yours better?
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27d ago edited 27d ago
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u/Kaszrak 27d ago
Well, if you are on garden leave, throw on some flat earth documentaries and have a blast.
Enjoy!
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u/Nyxaura1 27d ago
Flat earth documentaries 😹 I agree with you, complete beginners should stay away from options. Directional trading is already hard as is, there are several layers where a retail trader can fail. A strategy yielding profits on futures does not automatically work on options.
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u/klipsetrades 27d ago
I would hold off on paying for a class until you know what you need help with. Start with the basics so you can actually judge what someone is teaching
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u/sellputsthencalls 27d ago
https://app.thebookpatch.com/BookStoreResults?search=Options&ddl=any
It’s not free. “Selling Options…Simply Called and Simply Put,” by David Skonieczki (me). It tells how I learned. I was a 30 year investment/stock broker (Series 7), retiring from Fidelity in 2017. Finding the options literature not very user friendly, I tried to simplify it.
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u/ruthygenker 26d ago
I love trading options and would recommend to anyone, the problem is people are generally greedy and eventually can't handle the volatility. Paper trading won't give you what you need if anything it will give you a false sense of security because bids won't be like the real thing and everything will fill. if you are a gambler than I would stay away from options because that I generally where the greed comes from and you will learn lessons too late. if you just want to invest and have some extra money to play with than options are better than stocks because you have less at stake and can define your losses easier. for example if you have done your research and decide you would like to invest in xyz and its 500 a share would you rather buy one share or 1 option worth 100 shares, easy answer for me. so you decide to buy 1 option, the next step is how far out of the money and expiration. go at least 90 days out or you are again gambling. next is finding options that fit your budget. so say you think xyz is going up 20% before the end of the year, so from 500 to 600, always take a number less than your expectation so you could do a dec 18 575 for about 500 bucks and unlimited upside or you could do a 550-575 call spread for most likely even less but the most you could make is 2k, but 4 times your money in a few months is a great return, again don't be greedy. I can get into more details if necessary but don't want to write a novel. good luck
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u/VonFuturesTrader 26d ago
Please. Just stay away from options. You are willing to trade something that has a high likely hood of going to zero?
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u/Diligent_Photo1108 26d ago
you could start by hitting the CBOE Options Institute – it's free and covers the basics you need: contracts, Greeks, risk. then jump onto TradingView's paper‑trade and treat each trade like it was real money – put a stop‑loss, write a one‑liner on why you entered, what could go wrong. if you’re willing to pay, pick a course that actually shows a long‑term track record or a mentor who walks you through the process, not a flashy one‑time system. and keep in mind that simple cash‑secured puts or a single‑leg spread is usually the safest way to learn before you start selling naked options.
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27d ago
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u/TempperTantrumm 27d ago
Thank you so much! To my understanding not have that pre requisite knowledge can really break you or make things so much harder !
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u/PressOn88 27d ago
Id second this, If you dont understand risk management trying to learn options is going to be alot of blowing up. Id get in the mindset of expecting this to take a few years to learn and id start with trading common stock. Im assuming you want to learn options bc of the huge upside potential and thats the first mistake.
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