Believe it or not, these are all finance terms. More specifically, their trading strategies in the world of options. What's an option, you might ask - well, it's a contract which gives you the right to buy or sell an underlying asset (such as a share in a company or a commodity such as wheat) for a particular price at a particular point in time or over a particular period of time. Why should you care? Well, I'm taking a course at Columbia called Options Markets and I may be referring to it from time to time...
B8311 - Options Markets (Associate Professor Zhenyu Wang)
Zhenyu Wang uses the text Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives as the basis for his Options Markets course at Columbia Business School. In essence, my thinking is that this course will give me an opportunity to heavilly exercise my quantitative skills (we're talking calculus here ;-) and possibly give me a bit of an edge over my MBA colleagues in the application process for Investment Banks and other finance firms. It's also reasonably interesting - in the world of options trading there is always a winner and a loser for each trade, and you can make big money in options trading regardless of which direction the market is heading. Think a stock is about to plummet? No problem - buy a put option. Think a stock will rise a bit (but not a lot)? Try a bull spread to capture the small gain, but lower the cost by giving up the full upside potential. Of course, there is a downside to options trading - if any of your 'bets' are wrong, you could be seriously out of pocket.
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