Marcal, Misspoken, Seneca—interesting discussion on the risks of options. But couldn’t someone argue the exact opposite—that it’s better to start learning in a retirement account?

In an IRA, the brokerage literally won’t allow you to make high risk trades such as naked calls/puts. This guards you from getting into trouble. In a non-retirement account, I could make a mistake while putting in an order, or just think that selling this put on Amazon is really going to pay off because my buddy said so, and then the market moves against me and I get a margin call... this is simply not possible within an IRA.

Either way, I agree that a new trader needs to start slow and limit risk. It just seems like using some IRA capital to learn options is a way to force that limited risk on a newbie.