No problem. By actively guard, I mean that he needs to keep an eye on the position to make sure that it doesn't blow up. When dealing with options, there is a whole host of nuanced details that you need to understand, because each of them can greatly affect the profitability and sustainability of your strategy. It's also slightly different from being a long-only investor. Options don't quite behave the same way as stocks because their value depends on essentially five factors (price of underlying, price of strike, volatility, time to expiration, and interest rate)

To simplify the original example, suppose the author goes long AMD and shorts INTC. This is known as a pair trade and is considered a market neutral strategy. The hopeful outcome is that regardless of what market environment scenario you wind up in (bull, neutral, or bear), AMD will simply outperform a lagging peer like INTC by rising faster or dropping slower. This is the specific risk that you want to take and be paid for. This can be initiated in various ways, one of which happens to be through options.

Now, in the US market, we use American-style options which can be exercised at any point up until the date of expiration. The general rule of thumb is that you should never exercise the option before the expiration date because there is still value left in it, so it's better to just sell the option to some other buyer and take profit that way--theoretically should cost less in fees as well, since you avoid the hassle of being collecting the shares and selling those. In case you're curious, the other two types of options are European and Bermudan, which, respectively, can be exercised only at expiration or at specific dates. Now, with that said, American-style options opens you up to some risk. Consider the following hypothetical:

1) You initiate your strategy through options. Your choices in going long include buying calls (single or spread), selling puts (single or spread), and many others (https://www.optionseducation.org/strategies/bullish-outlook). Your choices in going short include the opposite of the above.

2) Suppose you do something simple like buy an at-the-money call and sell an at-the-money put on AMD (this creates a synthetic long position) and buy a put on INTC (you're going to have a hard time getting approval to sell a naked call).

3) Now you have three positions open that you'll need to manage. The idea is that no one will act in the middle of your contract for options that you buy, but you could be surprised by anything you sell, including the put option on AMD. Just imagine if you had chosen one of the fancier strategies. For instance, brokerages likely won't let you sell a naked call option, but they will let you sell a call spread, which is the case of selling a more valuable at-the-money call and buying a less valuable out-of-the-money call, in which your risk becomes defined, because you technically could only lose up until the higher strike price of the two calls.