The Greeks Explained

The Greeks are critical to understanding options and related risk management.

As we now know, the price of an option depends on many factors: the price of the asset, its implied volatility, the time to expiration, amongst other things. But how does the price of an option change as these variables change?

If volatility goes up 2%, how much does my call go up? If the asset increases by $10, how much does my put go down?

The Greeks offer an answer to these questions by measuring the sensitivity of an option’s price to changes in the input parameters. There are many different Greeks, but we will focus on just five of them.