Dear Mr. Sigrist – How can I get your Java (free) calculator code? – McTavish

Dear McTavish – Thank you very much for using our Option Calculator. You may come back to our website and use the calculator as many times you like. But the Option Calculator's code isn't available to the public for free. Of course, we would enjoy to adapt the program to your personal needs. – Daniel Sigrist

Dear Mr. Sigrist – I'm an MD/MBA student at UC Irvine. I recently ran into your calculator but am not too sure what the values mean. Specifically, I was wondering, how does one interpret the value produced by Black Scholes equation? What does it mean? What does a high value mean versus a low value? – Anh

Dear Ahn – thank you for using our Option Calculator. You're asking quite general questions. Therefore, I refer to John Hull's book "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives". Therein, you will find the answers to your questions to the last detail. – Daniel Sigrist

Dear Les – It's not the first time that I hear this remark when people try to print out their results. Unfortunately, this never happened to me and I don't have any idea how it comes to this phenomenon. Maybe you alternatively produce a screenshot and print it out. – Daniel Sigrist

Dear Patricia – We set the volatility at 30 because we considered it to be a good example. This figure is not supposed to be the stock's beta. Don't mix up volatility with beta: volatility is a statistical measure how the stock price fluctuates around its mean. Beta is a statistical measure of a specific stock's systematic risk in relation to the market risk. – Daniel Sigrist

Dear Mr. Sigrist – I came across your website when I was searching for a program that will calculate implied volatility of options. I was wondering if you new of any programs that calculated this, all that I want is the implied volatility, nothing more. If you can be of assistance I would greatly apprciate the help. – Brendan

Dear Brendan – You can calculate the implied volatility very easily by yourself (e.g. in Excel or with a statistical package). Either you have the time series of a specific stock and then calculate its volatility, or you know the option price for a specific contract. In the latter case one cannot directly solve the equation for the unknown volatility but rather has to use a numerical method (e.g. by an iterative search process which converges to the unknown variable - keyword: root finding). Nevertheless, don't rely to much on these results when you examine deep-out or deep-in-the-money options. In these cases options are relatively insensitive towards volatility. – Daniel Sigrist