Why I run LEAPS instead of shares
The core idea is time insurance. I buy the longest-dated LEAPS available as long as it's at least roughly two years out — I won't touch a contract with fewer than 600 days to expiration. That's not arbitrary. It means I'm paying for a genuine runway, not just a few months of wiggle room. The theta decay that kills most options traders doesn't get loud until inside 60 days. At 600+ DTE I'm mostly insulated from that clock.
Position sizing is simple: I target roughly 2% of total account value per ticker, built around one contract per name. In practice some cheaper tickers come in under that and some run a bit over, but the anchor is one contract and ~2%. The result is a portfolio that has historically run anywhere from 20 to 70 tickers depending on where I'm finding setups. Broad enough to not get wrecked by any one name, concentrated enough to actually move the needle when something works.
The tradeoff is that you can be right about a stock and still lose if your timing is off by a year. That's the job — picking the direction and the timeframe. The long duration is what makes that survivable.