Options Trading for Beginners

Options Trading for Beginners does what its title promises at a literal level: it explains what an option is, how it is quoted, and how to place one through a retail brokerage. It does not do much more than that, and viewers should calibrate expectations accordingly.

The course opens with Zac Hartley showing his live portfolio, a decision that sets the tone for everything that follows. Rather than lean on hypothetical case studies, Hartley narrates actual trades in Air Canada, Shopify, Apple, and Aphria as they happen, screen-recording his broker interface while placing orders, setting stop losses, and closing positions for profit or loss. This is the course's clearest strength. Watching someone execute a real order, name the commission cost, and set a limit-price stop loss teaches the mechanics of trading in a way a slide deck cannot.

Where the curriculum holds up

The early lessons on terminology and math are the backbone of the course. The breakdown of a quote like "F 08 21 20 7 C" into ticker, expiry, strike, and call/put is exactly the kind of literacy a total beginner needs before touching a brokerage app. The breakeven calculations, adding the premium to the strike for a call, subtracting it for a put, are worked through with real numbers pulled from an actual quote screen rather than invented round figures. The hedging lesson, which compares a trader who buys only stock against one who buys the stock plus a protective put, is the strongest piece of instruction in the course: it walks through both a rally and a selloff scenario and shows exactly where the insurance premium pays for itself and where it does not.

Where it falls short

The course's biggest gap is depth on risk management beyond stop losses. Selling a naked call or a cash-secured put is described accurately as carrying loss potential beyond the initial investment, but the course does not go further into position sizing frameworks, portfolio-level risk limits, or how much of an account should ever be allocated to a single options trade. The Greeks lesson, which should be a pillar of any options course, gets comparatively little runway given how central concepts like theta decay and implied volatility are to actual options pricing. Technical analysis is folded in mostly as a justification for entries rather than taught as its own discipline, so viewers without prior charting experience will find those trade walkthroughs harder to follow.

The live-trade format is also a double-edged sword. It is engaging and honest, including the admission that a cannabis stock position is down 15% right after opening it, but it means a meaningful share of runtime is spent watching order tickets and portfolio screens rather than absorbing new concepts. Viewers who already know how to read a brokerage interface may find several lessons repetitive.

Taken as a whole, this is a serviceable orientation to options mechanics for someone who already trades stocks and wants to see the on-ramp demystified, not a rigorous strategy course. Anyone wanting real depth on volatility, the Greeks, or systematic risk control will need a second, more technical resource afterward.

What you will learn

• ·How to read an options quote (ticker, expiry, strike, call/put) and calculate breakeven for both calls and puts
• ·The difference between buying calls, buying puts, selling covered calls, and selling puts, including their asymmetric risk profiles
• ·How to size a contract correctly (100 shares per contract) and avoid an accidental oversized position
• ·How to place a stop loss order on an options position through a brokerage interface
• ·How options can hedge an existing stock position, illustrated with a paired stock-plus-put example
• ·How options tend to track the underlying stock intraday with amplified volatility, useful for short-term trading