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Options and Options Trading: A Simplified Course That Takes You from Coin Tosses to Black-Scholes
Robert W. Ward
A friendly on-ramp to one of finance's most intimidating corners. Robert Ward, a former pit trader turned corporate trainer, sets out to demystify options without drowning newcomers in equations. The subtitle tells the story: the book walks from coin tosses and basic probability all the way to the Black-Scholes pricing model, building intuition step by step rather than front-loading formulas. Published by McGraw-Hill in 2004, it reads like a patient classroom course aimed at the motivated beginner who wants to understand what puts, calls, and volatility actually mean before risking money. It speaks to self-directed investors and finance students looking for a bridge between street-level trading sense and textbook theory.
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The author
Robert W. Ward came up through the trading pit, rising to manage traders at Merrill Lynch, and later consulted and trained for major financial firms including Prudential and Salomon Smith Barney. He also taught a course on options at New York University. That blend of floor experience and classroom teaching shapes the book's plain-spoken, worked-example style.
The book
Published by McGraw-Hill in 2004, the full title is Options and Options Trading: A Simplified Course That Takes You from Coin Tosses to Black-Scholes. It builds from elementary probability toward the mathematics of options pricing, aiming to make the Black-Scholes model feel earned rather than magical.
How it reads
As a primer it holds up; probability and the mechanics of puts and calls don't age. What dates is the market texture around it. The 2004 landscape predates the retail-app boom, zero-commission trading, and the explosion of weekly options and meme-stock speculation. Read it for the concepts, not for current market structure.
For more context
Pair it with Sheldon Natenberg's Option Volatility and Pricing for the trader's-eye view, or John Hull's Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives for the fuller academic treatment.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Robert W. Ward
- Publisher
- McGraw-Hill
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2004
- ISBN
- 0071432094
- Shelf
- Reference
- Location
- Colorado