[downerending]

In general, by gathering enough information, you can make your expectation for an options trading positive.

In general, this isn't true of games of chance, except somewhat for games like poker.

That said, I think I recall that pros refer to amateur traders as "stupid flow".

[TheTank]

Former options trader here. The reason its called stupid flow is that 99.999% of retail traders use them wrongly and don't understand them. That said, you can educate yourself and use options properly. But don't let any broker or retail educator "educate" you, they don't want you good and have huge conflicts of interests. Get education from technical articles and by learning the underlying maths and pricing dynamics, particularly the relationships between implied volatility smile and price distribution.

One of the main reasons they are dumbly traded by retail has to do with the ban of CFDs in the US. As retail investors want leverage (attracted by a quick buck rather than making money on the long term), options provide an alternative, and retail brokers push them to customers.

But there is a massively misunderstood dynamic: time. You don't only have to be right. You have to be right by a certain time. Another misunderstood dynamic is risk management. Options are useful as part of a portfolio, but if you use them only as a means to get more leverage on your directional portfolio, you will end up like all traders losing money that don't understand why. Yet the reason is simple: you took too much risk.

[downerending]

Good stuff. IMO, no one worth less than $1M should even be trading symbols, much less options. The "poor" should pour their money into low-fee Target Retirement 20XX funds and let them sit.