Just to clarify, why i say a lot of answers are wrong, I mean the ones that are telling you to buy certain strategies or watch top traders, not recommending books.
Those can predict market will lose everything , due to overleveraged trades and market throwing the totally unexpected .They will have the confidence and overconfidence to bet too much , due to greed ,then despair blown accounts.. It is difficult to know direction of option prices on expiry , in a months time or two months time.When you put on a option trade , it may be expire +10% or minus 10% or expire at the money .The losses may be overleveraged losses.
I did, a lot, back in 2013 when I started, and especially watched and tried to copy the way Karen traded. They really promoted her then. Let's just say I no longer traded like her and the tastytrade way.
Nah. You can reliably trade just the greeks on index option spreads. I don't know/care/speculate about where I think the underlying is going. I just trade the hard right edge.
After hundreds of trades writing call options, did not make money: picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, a few big losses wiped out all the small gains. And when I did covered calls, the results were worst than "buy and hold" the underlying (examples: GOOGL, MSFT, KRFT...). Good thing I did not leverage like Karen or I would be in a lot of hurts. Lessons learned for me: There is no free money if I mechanically trade, sooner or later the probability will catch up with me: losses = zero profits - commissions - slippages.
@ironchef: Writing call options and/or covered calls is not the "TastyTrade" way though. Their strategies include selling strangles and such at .16 deltas. I've been doing .11 deltas Iron Condors and so far things have been going well. I've also done some other trades that I've kind of created (at least I didn't see them elsewhere) and they seem to be working well too. They involve selling and ITM put spread and a call with the same short strike. As long as my BE to the upside is the same as the expected move and the overall credit insures that there is no loss to the downside. However, I don't have a lot of occurrences with this trade yet. So, I don't know if it will work long term yet.
If it was great and profitable , they would not be sharing it and the whole world would be doing it.If there are more premium sellers , the premiums go down , so you must have your own edge.
When I had an opinion on the direction of the underlying and sell options accordingly, I was profitable, of course my opinion wasn't always correct or I would be printing money.