Voiding all the pyschological factors, what would be the implications if you bought too many contracts? Is there such a thing as too many? Would mass pain fade you in this case? Will the market pin the price and burn the (tetha) contracts?
Are you talking about the number of option contracts in one specific position, or are you talking about the total number of positions that you have active an any given time?
You need a Business 101/1A class from a college. Take it in person and ask a lot of questions. On second though, take many business classes, including statistics. You can pick them up at your local community/junior college... I will not explain risk/reward here, but you need to understand it... You may be a gambler and not know it...
It's not so much of how many you can put on, it is how many can you exit safely at your price. Buffett uses dark pools to put on huge numbers.
The exchanges have position limits that are meant to prevent one party from having too much influence on the market. But you probably won't come anywhere near those limits. One popular rule of thumb is that you should not have more than one percent of your captial at risk on any single position. But that rule is really just an arbitrary benchmark that serves as a starting point for the conversation. How much you put at risk is a complex question that involves the size of your account, your trading objectives, and your tolerance for risk. I often hold multiple positions--across multiple expirations--in options on underlying products like SPY, SPX, and DIA, and those are all very closely correlated. So measuring my risk in an individual position doesn't tell me much. I have to look at how much risk I have on each underlying, or in each sector of the market, etc. And there are many different ways to measure risk, depending on what kind of positions you are trading. I sometimes take a long stock position and write a covered call, as a swing trade that I expect to close at or before expiration. Mathematically, there is a risk that I could lose the entire cost of the stock, because it could go to zero. But I'm not trading penny stocks, and in most cases, the probability of a total loss is extremely low. Many people who sell naked calls use some sort of model, based on volatility, to estimate their risk, i.e., their maximum potential loss, because in a raw mathematics, the potential loss is infinite. And that is not particularly useful information, because it's not a real number. Infinity is not a number. It is an abstract concept.