I've been stock investing since age 18 and option trading a little after that, mostly buying long calls on tech stocks I've been bullish on. I wanted to go over some good strategies for people that may be new to options:
Selling puts on stocks you want to own. If a stock trades at or below the strike price of the put you sold, the owner of the put you sold to can exercise the option. This puts you on the hook to buy from them 100 shares of the underlying at the strike price. THE BIG bonus here is that if you wanted to buy the stock anyway, you got to buy at a lower price AND get paid to do it! I can go into it more in the comments if anyone is new to options and confused.
Covered Calls. Say you own 100 shares in GE stock. It isn't performing well and you think long term it will trade flat or keep going down. You can sell calls at varying expirations depending on preference to pad your wallet in the mean time. If the stock goes way up and is now trading at or above the strike price (assuming you sold calls out of the money at the time of selling) you have to sell the 100 shares if the call gets exercised at the strike price. Don't underestimate the kind of return you can get on a covered call strategy. I've done the math on different stocks to do it with, with volatile stocks making the most money. Nvidia for example if you sold OTM calls every week or two expiring a week or two from then, that would net you anywhere from 25% to 80 or 90% a year depending on when the options expire and how close to the money they are trading at.
Long Calls or Puts. Its not a strategy I recommend long term as it is riskier and relies on you guessing correctly the direction of a stock within the timeframe you set up. This is difficult to guess right and I recommend strategies that offer some wiggle room on price direction. However short term gains can be quite spectacular if done right here.
I realize I made a pretty technical post to a lot of people. If anyone got anything out of reading this let me know. If you want to focus on the different gains made from covered calls on different stocks or for me to lay out the plays I'm making I can go ahead with that too.