Options: The Market’s Favorite Game Of Hot Potato

Here’s the hard truth: options are not built for you to get rich. They are built so the math wins and emotions lose. Most of the time, you are the emotion.

On paper, options are a zero sum game. Every dollar you make on a contract is a dollar someone else lost. Then you layer on spreads, commissions, fees, slippage, and the fact that most people are buying lottery tickets with no edge. Now it is not just zero sum anymore. It is negative sum for the crowd and slightly positive for the house.

That is why they feel “priced for everyone to lose.” The strikes, expirations, and volatility are not drawn out of a hat. They are based on models that bake in expected moves, interest, dividends, and a fat little cushion for the people providing you liquidity. When you click buy on a call or put with no real edge, you are paying the market to take the other side of your hope. The math does not care how you feel about the stock.

Market makers are not sitting there rooting against you. They do not care if you’re bullish or bearish on NVDA, SPY, or whatever ticker you are in love with this week. Their job is simple: quote both sides, collect spread, hedge risk. When they sell you a call, they are often buying some stock or another option to neutralize their exposure. They are not “betting” against you. They are balancing a book and letting time decay and volume do the work. They grind out small gains over thousands of trades. You swing for the fences on one or two.

So yes, it is dog eat dog. But most of the dogs are fighting each other while the house quietly sells tickets at the door.

The game really does look like hot potato. Risk, gamma, and volatility get passed around between traders. One guy sells a call spread. Someone else buys a YOLO weekly. Another desk sells a put to get assigned. A fund hedges a big stock position with protective puts. The market maker is in the middle, clipping tiny edges as the risk flows through. Most retail players are grabbing the potato right before it explodes and wondering why they always end up burned.

None of this means nobody can win with options. Some do. They have defined strategies, real statistical edges, risk limits, and they treat options like tools, not scratch-off tickets. They sell premium when it is rich, buy it when it is mispriced, hedge systematically, and accept that most of the battle is survival, not glory.

But if you are coming in thinking “this is how I’ll get rich quick,” understand what room you just walked into. The contracts are priced by models that assume you are average at best. The edge is thin even for pros. The house does not need to bet against you. It just needs you to keep playing.

The math doesn’t hate you. It just doesn’t care. And in options, if you don’t know exactly why you should be getting paid, you’re not the house. You’re the entertainment.