Selling Time

Most books about selling options tell you the strategy first. This one spends four chapters refusing to.

Commodity options pay a real premium. Hedgers who must buy protection pay above fair value, and somebody is compensated for absorbing that. It is a genuine economic function, and a private individual can perform it.

It is also an insurance business with thin margins, fat tails, and a structural asymmetry that points in the opposite direction from everything equity investors have learned. In grains and energy, volatility rises when prices rise. The naked side is the call side. The floor at zero is a convention, not a law - in April 2020 a barrel of American crude settled at minus thirty-seven dollars.

Selling Time is built in the order that keeps people solvent: the terrain first, then the physics of the premium, then the strategies, then survival. It covers what a futures contract actually obliges you to do, why your margin requirement expands exactly when your equity falls, why delta is not the probability you think it is, why the strikes that feel safest carry the worst economics, and how a professionally managed short-premium book was destroyed in a fortnight in November 2018.

Fifty-four original figures. No track record, no promised returns, no signals service.

Written by a physician who has traded options since 2012 and commodities since shortly after - someone whose profession is as far from finance as it is possible to be, and who therefore had to learn this the way you will: from the outside, carefully, and with a reflex borrowed from emergency medicine. Ask first what kills, rule it out, and only then work down the list.

If you finish this book and decide not to trade commodity options, that is a legitimate outcome and the book will have done its job.