The first three chapters explore the essential institutional features of the US options market, trading strategies and their payoffs, and develop boundaries to specify the ranges in which exact option prices must lie. Chapters Four and Five focus on formal pricing models to specify option prices. By moving from the Binomial Model to the Black-Scholes Model and Merton Model, the reader gradually develops an understanding of how movements in stock price affect option pricing.

The text is accompanied by OPTVAL!, an IBM PC program which computes virtually all of the model prices and examples in the text. Where applicable, the program can also graph option relationships. These capabilities make OPTVAL! an effective learning tool to illustrate and explore the option pricing relationships in the text , while saving the user time that would otherwise be spent performing tedious computations.

The texts brief, yet comprehensive overview of the complex issues surrounding options, the building block approach toward the factors affecting option pricing, and OPTVAL! software make The Options Primer a valuable resource for professionals as well as an ideal supplement to undergraduate and graduate finance and economics courses.