Options Primer

The Options Primer provides a brief yet comprehensive introduction to the complex issues surrounding options. To help the reader develop an understanding of the factors that affect option pricing, the text employs a building block approach.The first three chapters explore the essential institutional features of the US options market, trading strategies and their payoffs, and develop boundaries to specify the ranges in which exact option prices must lie. Chapters Four and Five focus on formal pricing models to specify option prices. By moving from the Binomial Model to the Black-Scholes Model and Merton Model, the reader gradually develops an understanding of how movements in stock price affect option pricing.The text is accompanied by OPTVAL!, an IBM PC program which computes virtually all of the model prices and examples in the text. Where applicable, the program can also graph option relationships. These capabilities make OPTVAL! an effective learning tool to illustrate and explore the option pricing relationships in the text , while saving the user time that would otherwise be spent performing tedious computations.The texts brief, yet comprehensive overview of the complex issues surrounding options, the building block approach toward the factors affecting option pricing, and OPTVAL! software make The Options Primer a valuable resource for professionals as well as an ideal supplement to undergraduate and graduate finance and economics courses.

ROBERT W. KOLB was John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Finance at the University of Miami until 1995. He is author or coauthor of finance texts on a range of topics including futures, options, financial derivatives, investments, corporate finance, and financial institutions. He was founder and president of Kolb Publishing Company, sold to Blackwell Publishers in 1995. His research has been published in Financial Management, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Risk and Insurance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Futures Markets.