Advanced Derivatives and Trading Strategies

Most derivatives courses start with Black-Scholes. This one starts with the question that came before it: what problem was someone trying to solve? Every instrument covered in this course, from the original forward contract to credit default swaps to variance swaps, exists because a real market participant had a real exposure they needed to manage or a view they needed to express. Understanding that origin changes how you read a position. You stop seeing formulas and start seeing intent. The course runs across nine units. You'll build from first principles: why derivatives exist, how options behave across their full range of inputs, and how futures markets price the cost of carrying physical and financial assets through time. From there, you'll move into swaps, which are the largest derivatives market in the world by notional value, then into volatility as a tradable asset class in its own right, and finally into exotic structures and how they're reverse-engineered. The last two units cover what most courses skip entirely: how to size a position, how to stress-test a portfolio, and how market structure affects what a trade actually costs to execute. By the end, you'll be able to read a derivatives position the way a professional does: not just what it is, but what view it expresses, what it costs to carry, where it breaks down, and how to get out without destroying the trade in execution. The course is built for people who work in finance or are moving into roles where derivatives are part of the job, and who want to go beyond surface-level familiarity to genuine fluency.