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Strategies & Market Trends : Options for Newbies -(Help Me Obi-Wan-Kenobe) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (1997)	10/18/2000 5:02:42 PM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 2241

how I can buy LEAPS I'll skip the part about whether or not you should buy leaps. - The first step is to contact your broker. You need to read a pamplet from the SEC that basicly says Warning, you can lose lots and lots of money through options since they have no value after expiration. You will also need to fill out a form which varies from brokerage house to house in which you detail how much experience you have. If approved by the broker you can deal in whichever options they are willing to trust you with. The actual buying of a leap is just like buying a stock except the symbols are different and you click on options instead of equities to get to the trading screen. In my brokerage I always have to put a period (.) before the symbol. You can find the symbols for options from a few places, I usually use: cboe.com , click delayed quotes . By default you get just a few near the money choices. There is a button for all options. A leap is just an option with a long maturity date, generally january of a year or two away. For example Intel January of 2003 call with a strike price of $55 have the symbol .VNLAK and were selling today for under $10/share. quote.cboe.com Note that when you buy 1 contract it represents 100 shares, so you have to multiply the price by 100 to know how much you will pay. The commission to buy or sell an option is typically about 3 times the commission for an equity. There is lots of good information about options on the cboe site. TP