The 7 Best Options Trading Courses
Options are one of the most powerful tools available to individual traders.
You can use them to speculate, make leveraged bets, generate income, hedge your portfolio, or build strategies with defined risk.
But options are not beginner friendly.
Every contract has a strike price, expiration date, implied volatility level, time decay factor, and more. That complexity is why so many new options traders lose money before they really understand what they're doing.
A good course can help you avoid paying that "ignorance tax." Plus, you don't need to spend a lot of money to get started. Some of the best options education available today is completely free.
In this guide, I've reviewed the best options trading courses, each of which can help you understand the mechanics, risks, and strategies before placing your first trade.
A quick look at the best options courses
| Course | Our Rating | Takeaway | Cost |
| tastylive | Best overall | Free | |
| Cboe Options Institute | Best for options mechanics | Free | |
| Selling Options for Income | Best for learning how to sell options | $79 | |
| Option Alpha | Best free, curriculum-based training | Free | |
| YouTube | Best for deeper research | Free | |
| Charles Schwab | Best for written guides | Free | |
| Other resources | Best supplemental resources | ~$20 |
Disclosure: Some of these are affiliate links. We may receive compensation if you take action through them.
Disclaimer: Trading options is risky and complex. Be sure you know your max risk and understand all of the implications before placing a trade.
1. tastytrade's Beginner Options Course: best options course overall
- Our rating:
- Topic: Fundamentals of options trading
- Cost: Free
tastytrade is one of the top brokerages for options traders. Its media and education platform, tastylive, offers live market commentary, actionable trade ideas, and free educational courses.
Its most popular course is the Beginner Options Course, which covers the fundamentals of trading options.
The course includes 40 lessons on options basics, options strategies, the Greeks, risk management, and more.
It's taught by Mike Butler, one of tastylive's main options traders and its primary options educator.
Mike also has a popular YouTube playlist, "Mike And His White Board," which goes deeper on options strategies and trade mechanics.
What makes tastylive stand out is that its education is rooted in real trading. Rather than just defining terms, Mike shows how experienced options traders think about probability, implied volatility, trade setup, position sizing, and risk.
This makes it a strong starting point for beginners who want to learn the mechanics of options while also seeing how those concepts are applied in live markets.
Since both the course and Mike's YouTube playlist are free, tastylive is one of the best places to start if you want a practical, strategy-focused introduction to options trading.
2. Cboe Options Institute: best for options mechanics
- Our rating:
- Topic: Fundamentals of options trading
- Cost: Free
Cboe is one of the largest options exchanges in the world and the company behind several major options products, including SPX and VIX options.
Its education arm, The Options Institute, has some of the most complete training materials I've found.
The best place to start is its Options 101 course, a 30-minute introduction that covers the core mechanics of options, including calls, puts, strike prices, and other basic concepts every options trader needs to understand.
From there, it has two separate courses which explain call and put options in more detail.
For more advanced traders, Cboe also offers a free Learning Portal with courses and learning paths on topics like index options, multi-leg strategies, hedging, risk management, crypto derivatives, and portfolio management.
The Options Institute also hosts live virtual classes on a variety of topics, making it a useful resource not just for beginners, but for traders who want to keep learning as they move into more advanced strategies.
Because Cboe operates the exchange where many options actually trade, its education focuses more on the structure, mechanics, and risks of the options market than on specific trading strategies.
3. Selling Options for Income: best for learning how to sell options
- Our rating:
- Topic: Selling covered calls and cash-secured puts
- Cost: $79
I've been trading options for more than ten years. Over that time, I've watched hundreds of hours of options education, tried countless strategies, and read every book I could get my hands on.
After all of that experience, the vast majority of my options trading involves two of the simplest strategies out there: selling covered calls and cash-secured puts.
I came up with a unique system for selling them, which allows me to:
- Make simple, low-stress trades
- Never fear assignment or losing trades
- Generate income from my existing portfolio (without changing anything)
After training a handful of people — including two financial advisors — on my approach, someone asked me to create a course so they could share the information with more people.
This is the result.
Over the last five years, this strategy has averaged a 89.8% win rate and a 6.61% annualized return. And that's without changing anything about my underlying portfolio, so that return is in addition to what my portfolio would have done anyway.
In my opinion, this is the right way to sell options. It just so happens to be quite simple, once you see the “Golden Rule” I teach.
Disclosure: This is an affiliate link. We may receive compensation if you take action through it.
4. Option Alpha: best free, curriculum-based trainings
- Our rating:
- Topics: Options fundamentals, options-selling strategies, and trade automation
- Cost: Free
Option Alpha is one of the best free resources for learning intermediate options-selling strategies.
I first learned about selling options through the Option Alpha podcast, back before the company had a full online curriculum.
The material was excellent, but it wasn't exactly beginner-friendly. I was often confused by the jargon and had a hard time keeping up with all the moving pieces in each strategy.
Fortunately for you, Option Alpha has created courses that make the whole process much easier.
The company offers beginner, intermediate, and advanced options courses, with roughly 15 hours of total content. The curriculum starts with options basics and moves its way up into advanced strategies and risk management.
The only reason Option Alpha isn't higher on this list is that its education now leads pretty directly into its automated, bot-based trading platform.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but as you get into the later courses, the content becomes more and more focused on the types of strategies its software is built to run.
Despite that, the free curriculum is excellent.
5. YouTube: best for deeper research
- Our rating:
- Topic: Everything
- Cost: Free
YouTube isn't a course, but it's one of the best resources for learning options.
As mentioned above, options are complex. There are a lot of moving parts. It's not uncommon to hear one person explain implied volatility, theta decay, or a vertical spread and still not fully get it.
What you need then is someone else to explain the same concept in a different way. For this, there's no better resource than YouTube.
YouTube lets you search for specific topics and watch several videos on the same topic. This makes it especially helpful as a supplement to a structured course. If you're confused by the Greeks, credit spreads, covered calls, or assignment risk, you can go to YouTube and find multiple videos dedicated to it.
Most courses explain each concept once before moving on. If you finish a lesson and still don't understand the Greeks, credit spreads, covered calls, or assignment risk, you can search YouTube for that exact topic and find multiple videos dedicated to it.
The challenge is quality control.
There are some excellent options educators on YouTube, but there are also plenty of people teaching strategies they don't fully understand. As a beginner, it can be hard to tell who is worth listening to.
A few channels I'd start with are:
You can also use YouTube as your main starting point. If you do, I'd begin with a few longer, fundamentals-focused videos that cover the core concepts in one place:
- projectoption: "Options Trading for Beginners"
- Invest with Henry: "Options Trading for Beginners"
Charles Schwab (next) and tastylive (earlier) also have excellent YouTube playlists worth checking out: Schwab's "Getting Started with Options" and tastylive's "Mike And His White Board."
6. Charles Schwab: Best for written guides
- Our rating:
- Topic: Fundamentals of options trading
- Cost: Free
Charles Schwab has a massive library of high-quality investing resources available to its clients.
Resources include video walkthroughs, articles, podcasts, and in-person events on topics like market news, personal finance, investing, retirement planning, day trading, and more.
For options traders, Schwab has video and written guides covering everything from how to place your very first trade to advanced strategies like spreads, iron condors, and rolling positions.
To get started, you can browse the full options library or check out the first lesson in its Getting Started with Options series.
Unfortunately, its library isn't organized in any particular way. There's no structured curriculum or step-by-step learning path — it's just a long list of articles and videos ordered by publication date.
Still, if you don't mind digging a little, Schwab's library is one of the most underrated resources for investing and managing your money.
7. Other resources
- Our rating:
- Topic: Everything
- Cost: ~$20
While this article has focused on online courses, there are a few other resources I'd highly recommend.
- "Options as a Strategic Investment": This is one of the most comprehensive books ever written on options trading. It's not the easiest read for beginners, but it's a great reference book to keep on hand as you learn more advanced strategies. (Free PDF here)
- Option Alpha podcast: This is one of the first resources I used when learning how to sell options. Some episodes are more advanced, but it's a great way to hear how experienced options traders think about probability, position sizing, strategy selection, and risk.
- tastylive: tastylive has live market commentary throughout the trading day, which is a great resource to hear how options traders are thinking about current market conditions.
- ChatGPT: LLMs can be very helpful for explaining confusing options concepts in plain English. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to explain implied volatility, compare two strategies, walk through an example trade, or quiz you on the Greeks.
- NotebookLM: If you're studying from books, course notes, PDFs, or transcripts, NotebookLM can help you summarize the material, create study guides, and ask you questions about specific concepts.
The main point is repetition. You probably won't understand options after one course, one book, or one video. But if you keep seeing the same concepts explained in different ways, they'll start to click.
Know before you go: a word of caution
Trading options is risky. Regardless of which options trading course you choose, I cannot emphasize this enough: start slowly.
This is especially true when it comes to selling options, which can result in “naked” positions and lead to nearly unlimited losses, similar to shorting stocks.
Before you place any options trade, either buying or selling, be sure you know the max risk of the trade and understand all of the implications.*
*This is something Kirk from Option Alpha explains very well in his Beginner Courses.
How we chose the best option trading courses
When evaluating investing products and services, we take the following into consideration:
- Core offering: How good the product or service is.
- Cost: The overall price, value for money, average cost per month, and any hidden fees.
- Usability: How well the course is designed, whether it's easily digestible and easy to navigate, and how responsive the support is.
- Credibility: The quality of information and data, as well as brand reputation.
- Audience: Who the product is for, the range of uses and applications, whether it actually works for its target audience, if it's the best option available, and any limitations therein.
- Offers: Whether there is a special offer for signing up or any discounts.
Final verdict
Options have a lot of moving parts, which is why they can be so confusing at first.
The best way to learn them is to work through one course and familiarize yourself with all of the concepts. From there, you can do additional research into the parts that didn't make sense, hear the same concepts explained in different ways, and keep going until the mechanics start to feel more natural.
One final piece of advice: don't bounce from strategy to strategy.
There are hundreds of ways to trade options. If you keep jumping from one strategy to the next, it's hard to get good at any of them.
A better approach is to find one strategy that fits your personality, risk tolerance, account size, and schedule, then taking the time to master it.
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