Option Trading is a very useful tool for stock market or commodity investors.
You can use options for hedging to protect existing positions or write options to produce cash income.
Option buyers are exposed to limited risk since the maximum loss they can suffer is the up-front premium they have to pay to buy the option.
The option writers profit is limited to the up-front premium they receive while losses are theoretically unlimited for call options and can greatly exceed the up-front premium gained.
Covered call writing does limit the risk exposure for novice option writers.

The Dow , having led the ftse lower by its close staged a moderate recovery later.
Poor august UK manufacturing data also weighed on London .
If you feel confident that the US mini-crisis will be resolved in the next 10 days you can buy a FTSE100 call option at 6300 strike for around 85 premium . Would not need a big bounce to bring that into profit. Not my choice or recommendation though !

Accompanying the strong up-trend in share price of VOD is an increase in option trading for VOD.
I contributed to that by buying dec 210Calls/220Calls and sold dec 215puts at a net 4 debit per strategy .
I anticipate the uptrend to continue as the sale of the verizon stake and big special dividend approaches .