Hedged

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.

If you've ridden this market up, you may be holding a position that's 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 how much a single bad quarter could erase. There's a third option, and you're closer to it than you think.

You already know how to buy a put and sell a call. Hedged takes those exact tools — the ones you've only ever used to chase gains — and points them the other way: at protecting a position you actually want to keep. That's the whole leap. Not a harder version of options. The same instruments, aimed at defense.

Written for investors who know puts and calls but have never used them to protect a thing, Hedged teaches defensive options from the ground up — plainly, honestly, and without a single leveraged position or four-decimal Greek.

Inside, you'll learn:

• Three tools, start to finish — the protective put that sets a floor under a position, the collar that lets your own upside pay for that floor, and the single index put that insures an entire portfolio in one trade.
• How to actually live 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 it expires worthless and you're simply out the premium, because most years, that's exactly what happens.
• When not to hedge at all — a three-question test that often points to a cheaper answer: just sell, or simply trim.
• Real, dated examples — Netflix's 2022 collapse, Apple's brutal fourth quarter of 2018, an NVIDIA run that made the cap sting — worked through with actual market prices, the wins and the dead losses alike.
• Full-color charts that show at a glance exactly where your floor holds and what each strategy really costs.

This isn't a book that promises to time the market or sell you the next crash. It's the straight-forward version: 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.

Speculation runs toward risk. This book runs the other way. By the last page, you'll know how.

Book 3 in The Options Strategy Series, following Assigned: Selling Puts for Income and Called Away: Covered Calls for Income.

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

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Who it's for

Investors who know puts and calls but have never used them to protect a position they want to keep.

Where to go next

• The Options Strategy Series Called Away: Covered Calls for Income Dean Cross

  
  The Options Strategy SeriesCalled Away: Covered Calls for Income
• The Retirement Income Series Harvested: Covered Calls and Cash-Secured Puts for Retirement Income Dean Cross

  
  The Retirement Income SeriesHarvested: Covered Calls and Cash-Secured Puts for Retirement Income