Category: Blog

Just a brief thank you for the two-day course on valuing options (with an emphasis on divorce valuation) that you presented to my group last week. The group consisted of a number of my peers/ competitors, all of us moderately to heavily experienced in forensic accounting and business valuations. Thus, it was not an easy audience to satisfy. However, you did it. We all recognize how dry the options valuation topic is, but nonetheless, my personal reaction and those of my fellow attendees was most positive. All of us felt that we got considerable value out of the program, and insight into how to best approach the issue of the valuation of options.

We certainly all appreciate your offer to stay in touch, and to bounce questions off you, and to in general continue to exchange information for our mutual benefits.

Once again, thanks and best wishes.

Extremely easy to follow. I can’t praise Black-Scholes Made Easy highly enough. Any student or trainee having to study this topic really should buy this tutorial.

Having a degree in Mathematics and a professional accountancy qualification did not prepare me for the explanations of Black Scholes to be found in most text books. They may have got a Nobel prize for their option pricing model but Black and Scholes were never going to get an award for clarity of explanation.

Having grappled with this area for a few months, I decided I needed a little more innovative help; hence my purchase of Jerry Marlow’s interactive tutorial.

Two days later and I feel I could go for the next Nobel prize myself! So many things click into place so quickly, it’s marvelous. Jerry gives his email address which I had to resort to for one query. He answered most helpfully within a couple of hours. 

Whether you want to trade options, learn how stock options are valued, learn about stochastic modeling, see how stochastic calculus works or are studying quantitative finance, the stock option simulator makes it easy for you to learn what you want to learn and much, much more.

The Shockwave movie on this page gives you a quick introduction to stock options and to option-pricing theory. It shows you the kinds of simulations you can run interactively with the simulator.

The book explains principles and shows you how to use the simulator to illustrate those principles.

In the simulator, change the stock’s volatility forecast, the stock price, the stock’s expected return, the option’s strike price, the option’s time to expiration, the stock’s dividends or the risk-free rate. Click some more buttons. See how potential option payoffs change. See how and why the option’s value changes.

The modern, sophisticated way to think of investing is this: Every financial forecast is a probability distribution. To value an investment is to evaluate its probability distribution.

This principle applies to every type of investment, not just stocks and options but also to bonds, commodities, collateralized debt obligations and other derivative securities.