Great question! Options are peerless financial tools, allowing you to boost returns, protect gains, and generate income. Understanding how options work and how they are similar and different to stocks will change the way you visualize and think about risk and return in investing. Option markets are essentially huge, real-time, open-source calculators showing what other investors expect to happen to stocks in the future. Just knowing how to read those tea leaves represents a huge win for you as an intelligent investor.