It was great to see many of you in the OptionsPlay instructional webinar on Wednesday, hosted by Grayson Roze and Tony Zhang. If you missed it or want to watch it again, here’s a link to the video.

If you’ve traded options, you know how time-consuming it is to comb through all the options chains trying to figure out what you want to trade. The OptionsPlay Add-On, exclusively on StockCharts, is a major time saver, and it’s here just at the perfect time — right now is an excellent moment to explore trading options. When the stock market gets frothy, options can help you hedge your portfolio positions, and when the market sells off, as it did at the end of this week, buying some protection helps to soften the damage.

As an example, if your portfolio is heavily weighted with semiconductor or healthcare stocks, you’re probably not feeling very happy. But if you had used options strategies for bearish moves such as long puts, bear put spreads, or bear call spreads, all of which you can analyze in the OptionsPlay Strategy Center, those massive losses would have been ‘less massive.’

A toppy stock market is challenging to navigate, and can leave you in a state of “analysis paralysis.” Should you add positions or wait for a pullback? But what if there is no pullback, and you miss out on the possible gains? Instead of entertaining these numerous scary thoughts, consider applying indicators that analyze the action beneath the price bars on a chart. StockCharts has a treasure trove of indicators that analyze market breadth and give you a deeper insight into market sentiment.

To get an idea of how many market breadth indicators are available, here’s a comprehensive list, which is just a start. There are plenty more breadth indicators. You can’t use them all, but, if you follow one index, there’s a chance there’s a breadth indicator for that index. So, explore and find the breadth indicators that can help you meet your investing goals.

If you haven’t done so yet, our webinar on how to use the StockCharts OptionsPlay tools is very much worth watching, showing you how to get started using these brand-new tools. Check it out now!