Just take it from someone who has been where you are

Do not start learning options trading in your 401k. Make a random
Brokerage account, and put some cash in you are comfortable losing. Every single soul blows up an account when they first do options, and the majority blow up more than one. Options trading are intended to be insurance, not primary investment vehicles, and are designed to lose money. To be profitable you need to not only guess direction, but also strength of direction. Additionally volatility plays a key role which is 100% outside of your control even if you manage to guess the direction/strength correctly.

Use them to hedge

“I’ve been wanting to get into options trading…”
That statement has lead to heartache

I consider myself on the aggressive side of investing but in retirement accounts (401k/Ira) it is literally all just dollar cost averaged index funds

Text me before u do this

This post was edited by Bazi on Nov 27 2024 08:20am

makes sense, thanks bro.

i was thinking conservative wheel method for some passive income, not sure how taxes works in to this in terms of capital gains off the options.

i was looking into using webull

In retirement accounts you don’t have to worry about tax burden there

In brokerage, options profits are NOT subject to capital gains since they are <1year holds and u will have to pay based on your income (whatever it is after you have written off what you can)

Not everyone blows up their account when learning options, the only people doing that are approaching options with poor risk management the yolo WSB mentality. Options are used to hedge investments, they're priced in as well but you can scrape some premium off the top because institutions make selling options overvalued, plenty of money to be made only selling options.

Starting out at options level 1 you could stick to selling only strategies cash secured puts, covered calls, buy-write's, avoid buying options other than LEAPS until you at least have a decent idea of how it works on both sides, this is where people get into trouble, using riskier strategies, margin, and poor sizing.

I started in my roth because I didn't want the tax burden and the account is forced into Options 1 so it handicaps me a bit, I also only trade with stuff I'm willing to lose you don't want to sacrifice your retirement over this.

Yeah I was referring to people who use options as primary investments vs hedging (their intended use)

Doing some end of year shopping this afternoon.

spot trading

These Fires are out of Control

Insurance Puts

Could do with some help lads.


I sold a put on Sofi for $15.5 on my paper trading account on webull. Obviously the strike price was hit but I didn't get any shares and just lost all the premium + some more. Any idea why I didn't get the shares? Presume I did something wrong.

theta decay?