Your retirement plan is very scary to us traders. You have been trading before. So you should know whether you can earn $$$ from trading. <5% traders can make it. You don't want to lose all your savings through trading. Trading (and gambling) during retirement is the last thing you'd want to do unless you have a good track record. Why don't you say buy some endowment policy or annuity plan? endowment policy gives some protection and some capital appreciation. You don't want Supplement retirement income ----> Retirement income diminution
Return has to be viewed in relation to risk. Risk-adjusted returns (sharpe, sortino ratios) is something you have to consider. With good risk-adjusted returns (>1 sharpe), you can always leverage up. Take for example snp500, it has a sharpe ratio of 0.5. To return 20%, you have to undertake 40% annualized risk. In very naive terms with no consideration of serial correlation of daily returns, you have to be able to tolerate annualized returns of -20 to 60% of 68% probability.
You may purchase options chain data from CBOE (around USD 300). If you want to test it for free, you may tap on Quantconnect platform to backtest it.
Apologies, but it's easy to hate on (incompetent) option sellers because the ones you see in social media tend to have an ego. So it's really partial venting as well.
USD in particular. I hedge my portfolio against USD exposure fully in my home currency starting this month. USD kinda eroded my absolute profits (in home currency SGD) by 40% and risk adjusted returns by half over past 4 months.
There's a line floating around that 90% of retail traders lose 90% of their capital in 90 days. Thus the reason brokerage firms spend so much of their income on marketing to find new accounts. If options are relatively new to you I'd set aside $20,000 to trade your strategies with for 6 months until you find something profitable. Finding this is difficult as market conditions always change high IV low IV bull / bear QE and rising of all asset classes etc. Writing ICs on the indexes with solid risk management and adjustment strategies should be part of your plan. Covered call writing against growth stocks or implementing poor man covered calls with LEAPs allow you to perform a monthly option sell against them as well. Develop some type of hedging strategy with VXX for the drawdowns. If you're risking 1.5 - 2% per position and keeping around 40% of your position in cash to cover rolls and adjustments you'll take away your risk of blowing out. But if you are already retired perhaps looking at an annuity is the way to go or some cash cow rental property depending on your market. To be fair I make most of my living from a day job and properties I own a mix of residential and commercial. I grew up around trading working with market makers at the CBOT in commodity options on the grains. My father was a career futures trader for large grain houses and for himself. It was boom or bust. Some years skiing in switzerland for vacation at Christmas and others months of eating Ramen noodles and and watching the beamer be repossessed. Overall he was quite successful and provided well but watching these swings in our lives made me also seek a lower risk strategy. His performance increased with mastery of risk management. A lesson that is hard learned and hard earned. I like to sleep at night not worrying about what the next day's market action will bring. If you figure it out please let us know. The holy grail is a strategy that works like this. As mentioned very few ever find it. But I guess if I did find it not sure I would share it. Happy hunting.