They were direct attacks at the stuff you wrote. Dont worry, tho. Many people find it hard to differentiate between the two.
Given your postcount, its a valid assumption that i dont know you. Why, then, assume that im attacking you directly? For what reason?
You are kind of right in that patterns like the straddle are traded. The fundamental problem with your trading strategies is that they arent traded as "trading strategies" but as patterns that can be applied to special situations. In that way, you missed the ops question.
The problem with option traders or option trading is that those who call themselves option traders often dont know the most basic things about options. Pick up wilmott on quantitative finance. or hull if you lack math education. study the first couple hundred pages. if you think you know your way around options, derive put-call-parity without cheating. if you cant do that off the top of your head, you dont know enough about options to talk about them, much less trade them.
the difference between any kind of stock and options on it is that a stock is a linear function of the well-being of the firm you buy stock of. meaning they work like f(x) = ax which is understood intuitively relatively well. an option doesnt carry that trait. options become worthless at some point. options are functions of volatility, time, expiration date, the stocks and its own prices. now you might claim that im overcomplicating things. might be true, but you oversimplify it to a point where you treat an option like a leveraged stock, which is incorrect.
its tempting to just trade options instead of stocks, because of all the leverage, but youre shooting yourself in the foot if you think that its that easy.
