Putting Greeks to Good Use

This commentary originally appeared Jan. 5, 2012, at 7:31 a.m. EST on Options Profits – the options trader's source for daily trading strategies and actionable trade ideas. Click here to learn more.

You can't trade options for very long without hearing about the greeks. Just as in the hard sciences, finance professionals use Greek letters to represent important variables. But instead of heat or viscosity, we're tracking variables like sensitivity to price (delta) and sensitivity to the passage of time (theta). Once you've learned what these options greeks -- these risk factors -- are, the next step is to apply them in your trading. For simplicity, let's just think about delta....301 more words left in this article. To read them, just click below and try Real Money FREE for 14 days.

Read the full story and get access to the Real Money Pro trading floor.

There’s no substitute for a trading floor to get great ideas, so Jim Cramer created a better one at Real Money and blogs there exclusively. We then added legendary hedge fund manager, Doug Kass, with his exclusive Daily Diary and best investing ideas. Staffed with more than 4 dozen investing pros, money managers, journalists and analysts, Real Money Pro gives you a flood of opinions, analysis and actionable trading advice found nowhere else, and allows you to interact directly with each expert.

Already a Subscriber? Please login.

Except as otherwise indicated, quotes are delayed. Quotes delayed at least 20 minutes for all exchanges. Market Data provided by Interactive Data. Company fundamental data provided by Morningstar. Earnings and ratings provided by Zacks. Mutual fund data provided by Valueline. ETF data provided by Lipper. Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions.

TheStreet Ratings updates stock ratings daily. However, if no rating change occurs, the data on this page does not update. The data does update after 90 days if no rating change occurs within that time period.

IDC calculates the Market Cap for the basic symbol to include common shares only. Year-to-date mutual fund returns are calculated on a monthly basis by Value Line and posted mid-month.