yes a good "Options Education" is the ONLY thing between you and the riches. Yeah baby, give me the education!!!!
i didnt mean that options allow you to decide exactly how much you're willing to lose. I meant that you can actually deploy some type of strategy. outrights are just up or down
I've always been successful with options, I find swinging options probably the safest way to trade. You don't need a stop loss, you risk is automatically built in, and you don't need much capital. Sounds like the OP liked out of the money options, and those are the most difficult. Volatility alone will destroy those. If you're a value investor and you have stock that you're planning to hold for a long time, then you can sell calls for some extra income. Add that to the dividend you collect from the stock and you can really hit some big home runs.
Stocks can gap in the middle of the day on bad news and what not. May not be likely but not impossible.
If you can make money other than options, consistently, why are you trading options? If you have not found your niche then maybe you'll find that at least with options you can stay in the game longer. You don't have to be a 'trained professional'. You can be a self-educated professional too. No matter what you trade, you want to be a professional right? Just because options didn't work out for you doesn't mean they don't for other people. The fact is that people do make a living trading options and if those people could make more money trading something else I'm sure they would be doing that instead.
Actually many option traders have come to the opposite conclusion -- the only way they can consistently make money is to do income trades that bring in maybe 5% a month. Calendar spreads, iron condors, and the like.
do you mean selling them or buying them? I would say that there is no easy way at all with options. Just like there is no easy way with stocks.
Options Pricing (aka pricing of a wasting "asset"), by default overprice (even when volatility is medium/low) most options, so it is very dumb to buy them outright (this includes leaps), you are a semi-sucker even to buy directional spreads....so what does this tell the retail trader? Stay the fuck away from these....