There is a cottage industry of people selling trainings and courses for trading options. As you'd expect, this tends to attract many of the same people as the o

There is a cottage industry of people selling trainings and courses for trading options. As you'd expect, this tends to attract many of the same people as the older day trading training industry. If you visit /r/options or /r/algotrading you'll see plenty of this spam in action. Instead of learning options theory from first principles, these courses focus on rote memorization of common patterns (e.g. "what is an iron condor"). Naturally the market is efficient enough that such a brittle understanding of derivatives and market dynamics is not consistently profitable. The people in the know (those who actually beat the market) don't teach other people how to trade, because giving away information is strictly less profitable than trading on it yourself (or on behalf of your firm). They also very rarely trade their own capital, and typically work within funds. This sets up a dynamic where it's extraordinarily difficult to learn the "proper" principles of derivatives trading in a sound framework of market microstructure unless you join a firm, because all public information on the subject is almost definitionally misleading. The next best thing is to learn from established textbooks, but surprise, very few people want to read three - five textbooks with advanced mathematics instead of watching a few webinars on "the greeks."