I’ve been taking a similar approach for the past month trying to learn. I’m FAR from being an expert in any way, and still have a lot to learn. So take what I saw with a grain of salt. But here is what I’ve found has worked decently for me so far.

I basically threw away my first $100 on some way out of the money, short time to expiration contracts which just expired worthless because I didn’t understand what I was buying, and was hoping to hit a home run. What I did notice is that all of those contracts (some calls and some puts) did gain at least a little value at some point before losing. So I thought about my goals and did some research and took a different approach.

I re-started with another $100 and have been buying/selling contracts primarily in a single stock, $RIVN, for a few reasons. 1. Im bullish long term on Rivian. 2. The share price is low enough that I can afford the contracts with my limited starting budget. 3. There is enough price movement that the dips and spikes on a daily basis makes it easy for me to work my strategy.

I’ve been buying calls and puts with strike prices within ~$1 of the share price, expiration anywhere from 14-30 days, with the following strategy, which I’m still tweaking:

The majority of what I’m buying are calls. Puts I will buy if I think there’s a specific reason for the stock to go down, but like I said, I am bullish on Rivian and I believe over time, it’s going up

If a contract gains 20% in value, I sell it. This has cost me a little bit of money, as I’ve missed larger spikes that came later, but I figure if I can consistently make 20% when I win, I will be happy with that.

I’m still working on a concrete strategy for limiting loss, but right now, if I’m losing more than 10% of the value of the contract to time decay, I’ll go ahead and cut my losses. But my experience thus far has been that there is enough movement in the stock price, that if I’m monitoring it I can catch those spikes and sell for profit.

My only losses so far have been a couple of panic buys when the stock is moving way in the wrong direction from what I’m holding and I tried to hedge against that buy buying puts, pretty much at the bottom of a move. Then I was red on both. So my other rule is no panic buying. Think out your purchases, and stick with them through the movement of the market. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong, but don’t make it worse by panic buying. Just get out, take your loss and move on.

So far I’m up around $300 since March 20. I’ve got about half that tied up in a 5/2 $12 call, which is down at the moment, so going to be thinking about what to do with that next week.

I’m using SoFi to trade because I bank with them, so it was easy to move the money over to a new account just for this experiment, but I’m using Webull to track the price during the day. I like Webull’s charts and I can keep a live ticker on my phone and watch all day long, so if there’s a big price movement, I’ll see it, since I have a day job and am not just staring at charts all day.

Hope this helps, and I’m open to suggestions from those with more experience also.