The Bible Of Options Strategies: The Definitive Guide For Practical Trading Strategies - by Guy Cohen

Guy Cohen lays out just about every option strategy that you could make work, given the right market conditions and your tolerance for risk. I would certainly put this book in the "Reference Book" category -- something that you would take out on occasion to answer a query about how a certain trade is placed or when it's a good strategy to use.

I started out with the intent of reading it from cover to cover. But I have to admit that I ended up skipping a lot of the material after reading the first 100 pages or so because it gets somewhat repetitious. So this indeed makes a good reference book, say, when you hear someone mention a "Long Put Condor" and wonder what it is. Or if you forget what market conditions (volatile, neutral, etc) would be required for a Bear Call Spread to work well. Also, I do appreciate Guy's organization of strategies by Risk/Reward, Direction, Volatility, etc. That makes it easy to get a short list of strategies given your own trading style and the market conditions.

What I found missing that I wish was there is information like how far from Option Expiry should this strategy be placed, what is an optimum range of IV for the underlying stock for each type of strategy, when should the strategy be repaired or exited? How do you repair it, or leg in or out successfully?

Also, I still do not understand what the little charts mean at the end of each strategy. I understand that they represent some kind of profile for each of the greeks, but there's no scale or indicators on the axes, nor can I find an explanation of what the dotted, dashed and solid lines mean. Maybe it's just me, since I've only been trading options for about a year now. If you're an experienced option trader, you'll probably know what they mean.