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ahhhhhh, alright I see where your getting now!
I'll sum up a chapter from Options Made Easy by Guy Choen (the first options book I ever read) and suprisingly the only options book that answered your question, at least from what I can remember.
What your doing, basing the purchase of an option on opinions about the underlying is by far the most common. Normally you could do this with just the underlying, but using options allows you to get leverage in a way that otherwise you could not. Using options also allows you to tailor the position you're taking to the exact specifications of what you're forecasting. Like seeing a rise to price X in the underlying, becasue you're price target is price X, you can buy a call right now and sell the call at price X, both having the same strike. This would reduce your net debit and allow you have less capital at risk as well.
And yes, people do make decisions about positions taken just off options themselves. One I can think of is a simple arb strategy. Becasue of the nature of this, a retail investor will not be able to preform it because of the high exercise feee involoved at most brokerages houses.
It's called a box spread. attached is the calculator I made for it. You're using 2 lines of options, at 2 different strike prices.
Buying the box involves creating a bull call spread and a bear put spread on the same strikes with the same expirations date. To sell a box you must create a bull put spread and a bear call spread. The payoff at expiration is the difference between the stirkes. If the box is selling below that price buy it, if its above the price, sell it. A decision based entirely based off the options components.
Attached is a calculator I created just the other day for it.
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