From Reuters:
After the financial crisis of 2008 hit their stock portfolio hard, Colorado Springs information technology contractor Mark Brisley and his wife Evie Petrikkou were worried.
Casting about for a way to make up big losses, the two hit upon a strategy often considered the purview of Wall Street insiders: They could trade options.
Brisley began with the basics, buying and selling "puts" -contracts that convey the right to sell a stock - to earn a little bit extra and protect the family portfolio from another debacle. Initially, he didn't dabble in "calls" - contracts that convey the right to buy a stock.
Now, five years later, he is a habitual trader who has embraced increasingly arcane options strategies. "We treat it almost like a business," says Brisley, 51.
Brisley may be the new typical options player - a do-it-yourself investor with a touch of gray.
The average options trader now is 53 years old; 28 percent of all options users are between the ages of 55 and 64, according to the Options Industry Council, a trade group. And those mom-and-pop enthusiasts have pushed trading volume up 16 percent a year (by number of contracts) for the past decade, according to the Chicago-based OCC, the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization.
When Fred Tomczyk, chief executive of brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, recently went to an investor education class on options trading, he noticed the crowd around him. "It was all people who look like me," Tomczyk, 58, told Reuters in a recent interview. "It was older people who are about to retire or just retired."...MORE
HT: Counterparties
In addition to the Danse Macabre the Black Death engendered a hedonism that morphed into straight up debauchery. I don't think we're at that point now, and a good thing that is, who wants to look at naked boomers?
Here's part of Botticelli's interpretation of Boccaccio's Decameron.
Partaay!
