DEFENSIVE OPTIONS - Warren Sedgwick

Most options books teach you how to make money. This one teaches you how to keep it.

Your long-term results are decided less by your best trades than by the size and duration of your worst ones. A single oversized position, one hedge sold three weeks too early, one decision made at midnight in front of a red screen - that is how portfolios are destroyed. Defensive Options is a complete, plain-English manual for the half of the discipline nobody writes about: protecting what you already own and surviving the trades that go against you.

Written for everyday investors who already know what a put and a call are, this is not another beginner’s primer and not a premium-income scheme. It is a working framework for turning open-ended downside into a number you choose in advance.

What’s inside:

- The recovery arithmetic that makes defense non-negotiable - and why a 50% loss needs a 100% gain

- Position sizing: the formula that sets your maximum size before you ever place an order

- Protective puts in full: choosing the strike, the expiration, the coverage ratio, and the exit rule

- Collars, and the honest price of "nearly free" protection - including what a zero-cost collar really costs you

- How implied volatility, skew, and volatility crush decide whether your hedge is cheap or ruinous

- Trade repair: structured alternatives to holding and hoping when you are already underwater

- Why a put is a stop-loss that cannot fail, gap, or be cancelled in a panic

- Ten specific ways accounts actually die - and one written rule that eliminates each

- Portfolio-level hedging, sequence-of-returns risk, and when plain cash beats any option

- A one-page written defense plan you can finish this month

- A full plain-language glossary of every term used

Every example is worked out in prose and clean text tables. No charts, no diagrams, no jargon left undefined - readable on any device, at any font size.