Am i cooked?

the fact you are using options as leveraged shares already tells me you are cooked

Options are not a terrible way to leverage shares… As long as you’re not like 50% out of the money when you buy them.

if you can buy the shares buy the shares you retards are also buying time decay and volatility thinking you are just buying "100 shares cheap"

If you’re really concerned about theta and IV you can set up a call zebra on a lot of stocks and still save money. But yeah, sorry, I’m not going full port on like 100 shares of SNDK when I can get a 100 delta ratio spread for a third of the cost. That’s not a great use of capital.

why didnt you do that? you used options as leveraged shares you think the downside cares? you are trading LEVEREAGED shares without know shit about how options work or are priced

Uh… I’m not OP.

I mean that far otm and expiry, there's very little theta to begin with. OP just didn't sell them lol

If you are asking this question the answer is yes… It means no strategy was in place

Why wouldn't you put a stop in at least at breakeven after being up 20%...

Never heard of it.

If this is a troll or a straight gamble cool. Have fun. If not... Learn it. If you want to make it for any real length of time you need stops.

I’m jk, I was suggesting op has never heard of it.

You bought a call that needed the underlying to increase by 55% in about 5 quarters just for it to not go to $0. The issue isn’t that you didn’t buy enough time, Google is up 19% in 3 quarters which is a great return, you went way too far out of the money. That position needs to be a lottery ticket scratch off that you hope for the best, but expect it to expire worthless, based on your post it doesn’t sound like it’s money you expected to lose.

Yeah this is interesting bc calls can profit before you reach the strike but it has to be somewhat reasonable. How do you get a sense of where that level is? I’ve been struggling with that

In technical terms its when Delta & Vega exceeds Theta. Practically it means that Extrinsic Value Increase enough to counteract the decay of the option.

There are two problems, a big one and a small one. The small one first. You paid extra for a January 2027 contract in order to give yourself more runway to make decisions, right? It's not January 2027 yet, so why are you panicking? You held through the Apr 2026 downturn that was lower than the current one, what's different with this downturn, which so far is less than April's? The big problem is trading on emotion and greed instead of with discipline and just the facts. If your position reached your profit goal, you should not have let greed talk you out of exiting. That was a mistake, but the bigger mistake is not having a trade plan at all and not having the discipline for following it. Burn this into your brain: Exiting a trade for a profit does not prevent you from staying with the trade idea for more upside. You could buy a cheaper call (further OTM) in order to ride any further gains up. As long as the new trade is a fraction of the profit you banked (say you banked $1000 of profit closing the old trade and only spent $250 on the new position), a total loss on the new trade still leaves you with most of the profit from the old trade. Best of both worlds.

Would now be a good time to buy a \~$370 leap?

What was your exit plan when you opened the position? I.e. max allowed loss, upside profit protection, etc. What's that? You didn't have an exit plan? I think I see your problem....😉 And no, it isn't that you "didn't buy enough time". Success in options comes from discipline, not hope.

The painful part in this post is that is you were up 25–30% and already had a profit taking rule, but ignored it. Use this as a lesson to focus more on following that process than regretting the entry itself. Rememeber that more time helps, but it doesn’t fix an aggressive strike. With long calls you need to be right on direction, magnitude and timing. That’s what makes them unforgiving

Am I the only one who hates when people do not show their trade. Backing into this it seems he paid 7.5.

Yeah, we need more detail lol

Yes

When I first got into googl options Google start trading sideways for like 2 months (I was pissed) I still don't like Google just because of that lol. Go get a call on slv with a jan expiration and maybe go for $60 You'll make money.

You hopefully will luck out with IV gaining closer to the next earnings call around the end of October. I have a feeling the stock will pump leading up to that, and if I were you I would sell at that point. I also know nothing, same as every one here.

Why

Asking Google to become a $5T company in a little over a quarter didn’t strike you as absurd?

iisconfused247 asked the one genuinely useful question in here and it got a hand wave, so here is a concrete way to size it. The market already tells you what move it thinks is reachable. Take the at the money IV, multiply by the square root of days to expiry over 365, multiply by spot. That is roughly the one standard deviation move priced in over that window. If your strike sits inside about one of those, it is a real directional bet. If it needs two or three of them, you bought a lottery ticket and the pricing already knew it. For profit before the strike, look at delta. Delta is roughly how many dollars the option gains per one dollar move in the underlying. A 0.30 delta call that catches a 1SD move up picks up real value long before it goes in the money, because delta rises as you approach the strike and gamma works for you on the way. A 0.08 delta call barely moves until the underlying is basically at the strike, which is why deep out of the money longs feel dead until the very end. So the reachable profit level is not a fixed price, it is wherever a plausible one SD move plus rising delta outruns your theta. Compare distance to strike against that one SD number before you enter and most of these regret trades never get opened.