Kinetic Trader

Options Trading Course Reviews

I thought I would write a quick review of some of the popular options training courses and programs that are available. I am only commenting on ones that I have purchased or at least spent time evaluating.

There are many other Options Trading programs on the market but when doing some research these are the ones I saw mentioned in multiple places. It is important to always be learning when trying to be successful in the stock market, especially with options. Also, keep in mind that when starting out there is lots of great free information in the education section of many of the popular options brokerages such as how-to articles and quality webinars.

It is easy to get overloaded with information and follow too many trading systems/methods so the benefit of some Options Training programs is that they provide a comprehensive and progressive training from beginner to advanced, continued support, and some even offer a community of fellow traders.

This post isn’t to focus on recommending any newsletters or stock picking services because it is better to learn a system and be able to implement it on your own rather than following some newsletter that just spits out trading picks. Your goal with investing in a training program is to teach and provide you with the knowledge to be able to invest/trade on your own and not be dependent on some continual service.

Before reviewing the options trading programs below, I should also mention that there are also many seminars and destination events that provide in-depth options training but they usually are quite expensive and generally do not provide you with ongoing support/updates that you might get with online training programs.

Below are some of the popular Options Training Courses :

Sheridan Mentoring

Dan Sheridan is widely known in the options world as he does the training for CBOE with webinars and seminars throughout the country. He was a professional options trader for about 20years and knows just about anything you can imagine about options trading. There are lots of free webinars on the internet that Dan has done that you can watch and get a good understanding of his trading style and teaching philosophy. He teaches a lot about proper trade sizing, managing an options portfolio, how to adjust various options trading strategies, and much more. He is more oriented around option income strategies instead of directional trading bets.

His training program is extensive and costs $6500 for access to his trainings(hundreds of hours) and coaching. If you are serious about how to trade options like a professional does then this is a top-notch choice. I don’t think I have ever seen a bad review about his company and training.

Options University

Options University is run by professional traders that have worked as floor traders and appear on CNBC. They offer a wide range of training products and services and it high quality. You can look thru their products and they offer some free training when you sign up for free, here is link to the training. I’m on their email list and sometimes they open up their services for free for a couple days and provide some excellent free real-time trading examples. Overall, a very established options training provider.

Options Animal

I came across Options Animal after watching a webinar with the CEO Greg Jensen in the education section of a popular Options brokerage. He did a good job on the webinar discussing a specific type of options strategy and I decided to look at their website. The only thing I found about it online independently was some reference to a past options training company called “Spread Trade Systems” that Options Animal founder had a partnership in.

From what I read that past partnership didn’t end well and was the reason for the start with Options Animal. I didn’t find much for independent reviews of Options Animals training and I listened to some of their webinars they provide to explain their training methods. The negative I have for it is the sales funnel they put you through requiring you to talk with a sales consultant about the products offered.

Obviously they are a business and trying to make money but the whole sales interview process was annoying and a turn off to me. They sent me the training materials that explains the options trading strategies they teach and I guess they have a unique spin on how to choose their picks ? You can review their blog posts to see they are focused on risk and teach about adjusting positions which is key to options income trading. I didn’t see much for reviews but the course costs $8,000 when I looked at it. I guess it is inline with the industry but again I was turned off by the sales pitch and felt they were more interested in upselling me.

Jeffrey Ziegler

I was referred to Jeffrey Ziegler a while back and he does a good job of really laying out the basics for credit spread trading. He is a retail trader and not a former wallstreet trader, so he lays things out well for someone totally new to spread trading and how to approach it. His Spread Trading course content  is mostly from 2007-08 and he provides some picks and market analysis each week that you get from the beginning when signing up and can continue getting if you subscribe to his monthly service that costs $150/month.

You get access to the entire training/content at sign-up and can review his past market analysis videos for how he evaluates the market. The training is all about bear call credit spreads and bull put credit spreads. He also goes into some chart reading patterns and basic setup.

For someone totally new to options it’s good and will keep you focused only on credit spreads. I think he does a good job providing steps to follow and a system to stick to with credit spreads. If you decide to branch out to other options trading strategies then you can move onto other higher-end comprehensive options trading courses on the market after going through his course.

He also just started offering a directional trading program for people that are more serious about Options trading. It is called Maximum Control Trading Academy and costs $2,000 for lifetime. It seems decent and I like his approach/method to the market so the course is probably worth it for someone that needs serious direction/focus in their trading.

Weekly Options Windfall

I kind of stumbled onto this course when I was first getting into learning more about weekly options. Preston James is the creator of Weekly Options Windfall and he is a successful independent options trader. He has numerous past options training courses and I couldn’t really find any review on Weekly Options Windfall so I bought it for the $800 offer price. I was pretty disappointed by the quality of information and some of the advice about expiration day pinning trades were easy way to lose a lot of money. I guess my problem is that the course is marketed towards beginners and first time options traders with unrealistic expectations. Also, the support was severely lacking. Maybe the content has improved since I had bought it(hopefully).  (I briefly mentioned this course in a past post that I wrote about weekly options)

Trading Pro System

I have written about Trading Pro System on this site in the past as the course really helped explain some options trading concepts that I didn’t understand when getting into options. For the $200 price I found it to be quite excellent and detailed. It’s a few years old and covers a lot of content in one course but it helped me a lot when starting out. For the cost of options training on the market I still highly recommend this product for the price vs. content offered. You can reference past post I wrote about it Post 1 & Post 2 .

Full Disclosure: I receive potential referral commission on Trading Pro System if you buy thru my link, but this compensation does not affect my review/opinion. I don’t receive any other compensation from any of the other services mentioned in this post. The above opinions are my honest experiences and observations of these programs.

In conclusion I only touched on a couple of the popular options training courses. There are definitely many more options trading courses and programs continually coming to market, so I can only share what I have looked at or tried.

I am sure there are some good ones that I have missed so please leave a comment of any that you recommend as I would love to hear some feedback.

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