Basic option strategies: the TLDR; guide: If you are buying options - you will consistently lose money. Both time and risk premia overpricing go against you. I

Basic option strategies: the TLDR; guide: If you are buying options - you will consistently lose money. Both time and risk premia overpricing go against you. If you don't make the mark within the time period (and market dynamics are notoriously hard to predict) - you will lose 100%. Breaking even often requires a large 5-7% move in your favour - and that just doesn't happen often enough - especially in the one month buy-to-mark time frame that most options trade at. Nassim Taleb does this - he probably makes more money selling pretty books and giving fancy talks. If you are selling options - you will consistently make fat stacks until you blow up (since you're the counterparty of the above buyers). You can push naked index puts or calls all you want, and make an absolute fucking killing. I'm not kidding. You could easily pull $10-200K a month in profit, depending on how much of a baller you think you are, and how much capital you have backing your risk-taking ass (talking individual traders here). But this money isn't without insane risks, have no doubt - you are playing with an armed thermonuclear warhead. If all the market correlations go to one and you're the last guy holding the bag containing other people's vol - you will get decimated. LTCM did this for 3 years - blew up year 4 - lost $5 billion in one month. LTCM principals went on and started a bunch of similar firms - finance is apparently very forgiving of failure - it shouldn't be. Most of those funds went thermonuclear back during the 2007 GFC. If you do a mixed strategy - you'll end up with mixed results - because you're just mixing the above. No option strategy outside of market making consistently makes money (computational traders making markets and taking hedged spreads). It's exactly like insurance. Insurance buyers pay up, but they never want to actually use it (unless they are committing fraud/market manipulation), and are happy to burn that cash to protect themselves. Insurance sellers are happy to sell, but their industry is commodity, and the only way they make money is by investing the float they have on hand between cash inflows (buyer premiums today) and cash outflows (buyers claiming a year later). Problem is shares aren't like physical goods - they aren't bound by physical laws and hence do not follow the normal distribution. Share prices can go to infinity and hit zero all over the course of a day - their just bits of data in a db somewhere in Jersey. Car crashes, geographically separated houses and diversified mega-cat risk don't do that - often :D. If you put in a costless collar on a stock you already own, you cap both your upside and your downside relatively cheaply (this is how Mark Cuban survived the dot-com crash with $2 billion in Yahoo! stock). Outside of those few lessons - unless you are pushing statistical liquidity or selling millions of options per day - stay the fuck away from them. Individual investors should either go passive index or if they know an industry inside and out value-growth. Everybody else should either be supply liquidity (HFT - not too profitable anymore) or pushing relative stat arb (RenTech/Shaw's + hundreds of PhDs). Individuals should not try to compete in this area - at all. Just like you don't try to build your own car, cruise ship, 747, iPhone or tank, you shouldn't try and trade against stat. arb/HFT guys without the mental or financial backing to hold your own shit. Value-growth/passive works because the market comes to you - hat in hand saying - here take my money please. Stat. arb/HFT also works, but it's much harder, because you have to go to the market and make sure that it isn't you that is saying - here take my money, please.