Trading in Options

I was recently thinking about investing in options. I think it was the news article I came across about persons who were former Nortel employees losing benefits. Nortel was once a great telecommunications company, in fact my husband had a relative working there who did very well and enjoyed it for quite a while. It was sure too bad how it faltered and sought protection from creditors. Anyways, to bring me back to options, somewhere in there when I had a little bit of money to invest (i.e. before I had children) I dabbled a little bit in trading in options. By purchasing an option to buy shares, it was possible to make some money if the price of the underlying share rose. Since Nortel was at that time such a dynamic company, it was possible to purchase options to buy ('call options') and sell them within a few days if the price was on its way up, as it often was. Any slight movement in the share price tended to cause a larger movement in the option price. I did write a bit of a summary of how call and put options work, which I placed on Suite 101 at http://www.suite101.com/content/investing-in-put-options-and-call-options-a322335 . The best I ever did was to make about a thousand dollars, though the options I sold at that time eventually came to be worth tens of thousands of dollars (just happened to be at a time when the price of the underlying share shot upwards!). Overall, I just broke even. If someone had more time and expertise that I did in examining the trend of the price of a particular stock, and keeping on top of exactly what is happening with it, I think there is a good chance of maintaining a positive return over time. Since I have neither at this time, I will leave it to those with deeper pockets!