My take on why options are bad—options are bad most people because most people don’t get use from hedging, don’t have enough information about the timeline of price movements, and all you’re left with is a form of gambling. A form of gambling that’s pervasive enough to worry me. People on Reddit trying to get rich with SPY options (how could you possibly know where SPY is moving?)

Short positions are also bad, because there’s an ongoing cost to carrying a short position, and that cost is likely to cannibalize your expected gains.

Lots of good reasons around to avoid short positions and options like they’re the plague. I don’t like the “unlimited downside” reason because it’s solvable.

To people who are making lots of money in stocks or options… my question is always, “do you have high returns, or do you just have high volatility?” Because it’s easy to look at high short-term returns and believe that you’ve somehow beaten the market, when you’re really just holding a high volatility position that got lucky.