After costly debacle(s) with Tesla puts I told myself "Never again puts. Only calls". A friend with decades of experience in option trading (He doesn't do it anymore, saying it was a zero sum game for him, that he mostly was right from the direction, but wrong from the timing) replied "Why? It's the same whether you bet with puts on falling or with calls on rising prices".

Is it?

Are you asking whether going long calls or going long puts are the same? Of course not! In one case you are going long the underlying, in the other you are shorting the underlying. Stock on average goes up over time, so betting short, on average is a loser while going long, on average, is a winner. Does this mean you can't make money going short? No, but it means it is a lot harder to make money going short.

Or are you asking whether going long by buying calls and going long by selling puts is the same? Well these are a lot more similar, probably more similar than different. Some people think they are earning the time value of options when the short a put instead of going long a call, but that is not quite right. As you note, the performance of options is not symmetric to rising and falling prices. So going long using calls, you have a hard limit on your losses: you can't lose more than every penny you invested in going long the calls. But writing (or selling) puts to open a long position, you can in principle lose a lot more than you "invested". Of course it is tricky to say how much you "invested" when you write a put since you actually get paid cash to write a put. But let us say you find a put with about the same leverage and time-to-expiry as a candidate call position. You are risking more on the downside writing the short put than buying the long call. To make up for this extra risk, writing calls is cheaper up front, you actually get given cash when you write the put, but you will have a longer tail of losses writing puts than buying calls.

And in any case, unless you are buying in the money LEAPS to get some leverage, you are betting on the timing of the market in any other option trade. Don't kid yourself by thinking you are not.

R: