Spread Trading: An Introduction to Trading Options in Nine Simple Steps

CHAPTER 1

Lon and Shorty

Lon was tall, prematurely graying, a creative thinker with interesting hobbies and intelligent children, and he was starting to feel like a real dope.

He was trying to secure his family’s financial future, looking for this investment and that, the way a good father and forward-thinking man should, but he was starting to doubt his intelligence. Lon had started playing the stock market.

Well, of course, first he’d had to convince his wife he wouldn’t lose everything they had on wild chances. That took some doing. Lon liked to think of himself as a pretty smart guy, but Cass had taken a pretty dim view of his creative enthusiasms ever since they took that trip to China without using a tour guide and spent the better part of a week trying to find a bathroom. And then there was that time he’d bought a time-share in London ... Nebraska. He could never win an argument once she mentioned that.

But invest they must if they wanted to retire well, and Cass knew it as well as he did. They wanted to travel; spoil grandchildren; wear big, high-priced hats—Retire with a capital R. No 401(k) was going to do that for them. And even she knew he wasn’t as big a dope as Bruce.

Bruce was the reason Lon and his wife didn’t use a fund manager or financial adviser of their own. Bruce was Lon’s fat, loudmouthed brother-in-law, and the biggest oaf on the planet. Lon’s sister would start a family crisis if they used any other money manager, so he had to handle his investments himself. ...