These notes and slides cover the theory and practice of derivative securities — forwards, futures, options, binomial pricing, and Black-Scholes applications. I developed them for my Online Options and Futures (FIN 6524), Options and Futures (FIN 5240), Derivative Securities (FIN 5241), and Options, Futures and Derivative Securities (FIN 4510) courses at WashU Olin Business , at the undergraduate, graduate, and MBA levels. The material draws on notes originally developed while teaching at ESSEC Business School and the University of Miami .
The first half builds intuition through replication and no-arbitrage arguments, covering option properties, trading strategies, and binomial pricing in discrete time. The second half moves to continuous time, deriving the Black-Scholes model from first principles and extending it to options on indices, currencies, and futures, along with the Greeks and exotic payoffs.