THE DAY-TRADING DAZZLE OF BUYING OPTIONS UPDATED — 3/3/21, a 163% gain.

Friday’s 287 in-the-money put up 163% on two trades for the day.

This chart is set to display return per $1K in play in the white flag or horizontal line on the right axis (the #1Kdaytrade on Twitter), and the #10Ktrade in dollars in the green flag or horizontal line on the right axis, which also makes for easy percentage calculations.

THE TRADING STRATEGY

There are so many options strategies in the stock market the head spins — a straddle, a strangle, a naked and/or a covered put and/or call, a calendar, a condor, an iron condor, an iron butterfly (isn’t that a rock band?) and any combination of any of these for hedging purposes, for capital appreciation or preservation, for gambling. Mind boggling.

But buying options…

Buying options, just plain buying a call or a put, everyone will say is a “fool’s game.”

Regardless of whether a trader buys calls or puts on index ETFs like SPY or QQQ or IWM, or buys options on stocks, there are only three things that can happen — the option goes the trader’s way (good), or the option goes against the trader (bad), the option goes sideways with price decay over time (also bad).