Home The Options Strategy Series
Hedged
Protecting Your Portfolio — A Beginner's Guide
A gain that took years to build can be halved in months, and you don't have to predict the crash to protect what you've already made.
Speculation runs toward risk. This book runs the other way.
If you've ridden this market up, you may be holding a position that has grown larger, and more nerve-wracking, than you ever planned. Sell, and you hand a slice of it to the tax bill and risk missing the next leg up. Hold, and you lie awake doing the math on what one bad quarter could erase. There's a third option.
You already know how to buy a put and sell a call. Hedged takes those same tools, the ones you've only ever used to chase gains, and points them at protecting a position you want to keep. It isn't a harder version of options. It's the same instruments, aimed at defense, taught from the ground up without a single leveraged position or four-decimal Greek.
The examples are real and dated: Netflix's 2022 collapse, Apple's brutal fourth quarter of 2018, and an Nvidia run that made the cap sting, all worked through with actual market prices, the wins and the dead losses alike.
It won't promise to time the market or sell you the next crash. It shows what protection costs, what it's worth, and how to decide, for your own portfolio, when it's worth paying for and when it's money thrown away.
Inside the book
- Three tools, start to finish: the protective put that sets a floor, the collar that lets your own upside pay for it, and the single index put that insures a whole portfolio in one trade
- Living with a hedge: when to sell a put instead of exercising it, when to roll it, and when to take it off
- The honest cost of protection, including the ordinary years the put expires worthless, which is most years
- When not to hedge at all: a three-question test that often points to a cheaper answer, simply selling or trimming
Charts show at a glance where your floor holds and what each strategy really costs.
Look inside
A few pages from the paperback. Select a page to see it full size.
- The contents
- The opening of Chapter 1
- Figure 1.1: a protective put sets a floor
- Figure 7.1: a rolling put program in a rising market
Who it's for
Investors who know puts and calls but have never used them to protect a position they want to keep.
