All it takes to attract the interest of a lot of older investors is to use the word income with an investment. This is a foolish bias that can cost them though. The strategy of selling covered calls is widely promoted, especially to older investors who find the fact that this is framed as a […]

While many investors see options positions as a risky way to hit a big score, options are also used to protect against risk. They all need to come with warnings on the label. It is always curious to see people recommending options trading of any sort to individual investors, given how complex options trading is […]

Steven Sears has been writing columns promoting options trading for individual investors since 2006. He’s now suggesting that they use options to replace dividends. Dividends have always had a special place in the hearts of many investors, a love affair that continues even in the face of the economic crisis that we are in the […]

You don’t see all that many articles on options plays in the popular financial media, but Barron’s columnist Steven Sears is known to provide a few, and has another for us now. Not a lot of people invest in options, and with good reason. They just don’t know their way around options and may not […]

There are various strategies that we can use to manage a stock market plunge. One of these are playing the VIX, and using options is one way to do this. Does this make sense now? The volatility index is a tool that a lot of people use to measure market sentiment trends in the next […]

While the stock market marches on, many institutional investors worry that it may be over soon. Using options is one way to contain this risk, but is it a good way to do it? With the S&P up 22% from its recent lows, many investors are happily hanging on to their stock positions. Most investors […]

Trading in options is far from the beaten path of your typical investor, especially selling them. Some investors do use this strategy though, but they can be plenty tricky. The world of options trading is a complex one to say the least, about as far as you can get from your normal buy and hold […]