Books for beginner-traders come a dime a dozen. Most will teach you bad lessons you will never unlearn. This book is an exception. It doesn't so much compete with Natenberg's (1994) classic as complement it. While Natenberg focuses on qualitative aspects of options markets and trading, Ward focuses primarily on communicating the mathematics. The first two thirds of the book develop basic understanding of mathematical concepts leading up to the famous Black-Scholes formula. The final third delivers some mostly excellent advice on trading.

This is a book for someone who is just starting out as an options trader—someone who has a liberal arts degree, but whose connections somehow landed him in a trading or sales position. If you know what a standard deviation is ... or a normal distribution, or a calculus derivative, this book is not for you. If you don't, you need to understand these terms, and this book will get you up to speed. Starting with simple coin tossing experiments, the author introduces binomial trees. He illustrates how these might be used to value simple options. He then describes normal distributions, simple statistics and, ultimately, the Black-Scholes formula. Discussions are very intuitive. The author makes wonderful analogies. Be aware that the treatment is VERY elementary, so readers with some math skills are likely to be bored (consider Chriss (1997) and an accessible but more sophisticated alternative). I think the readers this book targets will struggle at points—especially when Ward introduces the normal distribution, continuous compounding, and the Greeks. Don't get bogged down at these points. Find someone to explain them to you, and keep going. The author repeats several times that the book won't make you an expert. It simply is intended to get you up to speed, and it does an excellent job. Along the way, it communicates how a trader should think.