Nice article, I'll definitely read some of the outlined books.
Thanks for sharing.
My personal experience is that you don't need to fully understand
the Black Scholes Pricing model in order to trade profitable options.
As an example consider the public income trades, such as
NetZero, Boxcar, M3, Theta Engine.
Trading those doesn't require you to understand how Implied Volatility.
One can argue, however, that selling options and hedging them
isn't the 'Quant way' of profiting from options.
The Black Scholes paper is actually pretty difficult, and not terribly rewarding with respect to developing intuition. To develop the intuition, get a full handle on put-call parity, the construction of replicating portfolios, and then risk-neutral pricing. Additionally, always have an eye on the intrinsic value, time value and insurance value of options and how they move with respect to the options characteristics.
I found learning about the binomial model to be particularly good at establishing intuition about option pricing. Nowadays it's considered a toy model but it makes the ideas of a replicating portfolio and risk neutral probabilities very clear with nothing more than basic high school math.
My personal experience is that you don't need to fully understand the Black Scholes Pricing model in order to trade profitable options.
As an example consider the public income trades, such as NetZero, Boxcar, M3, Theta Engine. Trading those doesn't require you to understand how Implied Volatility.
One can argue, however, that selling options and hedging them isn't the 'Quant way' of profiting from options.