I am trying to grow a $100 portfolio trading options.

Why do you want to trade options? Make money? Shits & giggles & YOLO?

Do you know anything about financial markets?

First I would pick a company (or 2) you like & want to follow for a while & buy $50 worth of fractional shares and then $25 worth of SPY (S&P500 ETF). And then follow them up & down for a while. See how they respond to news & earnings releases etc.

And start depositing more $ to build your account. $5, $10, whatever you can afford day by day & week by week.

And after a year (or two) when you’ve been following the markets for a while & have built an account with a couple thousand instead of $100, you’ll be much better positioned. Because right now, you might as well withdraw that c-note and go treat yourself & a friend to a nice dinner.

When trading options a good rule of thumb is your position size is your amount risked (unless way itm). Another rule of thumb is to risk 1% per trade.

I don’t think you can put on any good positions for $1.

I built a similar account up to about $2k using gorilla trades option ideas. My subscription expired and I have not decided if I want to renew it or not. Most of the ideas are for larger accounts so the ones I could act on were few and far in between

With a tiny account, option fees could actually rack up a significant percentage. Probably not a great instrument.

You could look for leveraged ETFs and try to day trade them or something, I think you’d have a better chance there.

If you really want to do something with options, my suggestion would be use verticals:

1) Only use options chains that have a close bid/ask price, at least for the near the money strikes. Otherwise you may not be able to exit your positions so easily.

2) Look for options chains that have $1 or possibly even $0.50 increments. This will keep your verticals in the $50 to $100 range.

3) Look for times when you think the stock is at a peak or a low. Try to pick strikes so that you can set up a debit spread to profit.

Some fake examples: XYZ ticker is trading at $10. This is a 52 week high and you expect a pullback. You buy the $10.50 put and you sell the $9.50 put with whatever expiration you think is enough time, let’s say 2 weeks out. It costs you around $50. Your thesis was correct, the XYZ price pulled down to $9.50 with a week to go. Market price is $85 for that spread now (that you paid $50 for). You close for a ~$35 profit minus probably $3 in fees (almost 10%!)

ABC ticker is trading at $19.50. They often traded in the $23 to $25 range. Below $20 is very near their 52 week low. Additionally, ABC is seasonal with their largest profits of the year expected in the upcoming earnings event in about two weeks, along with what is typically their biggest dividend payout of the year. You’re confident that within 60 days, the price will move up to the $23 range. We’re not going to be super greedy, but you have all these signs and you are willing to take a bigger risk here. So we buy the out of the money spread from $21 to $22, with 60 days to expiration. It costs around $25, so you decide you can afford to buy two of them. Here again, your thesis was correct and within 30 days the stock is already up to $23. Your spread is worth around $50 now, and you have two of them so you close them both, around $50 in profit minus another 10% or so in fees.

There are some ways for you to try to get high return rates on small amounts of capital. I’ve also tried to include suggestions via example to give yourself time to be right and to be ready to close early. It’s a very directional idea and you only have to be right for it to work!

play 0dte spy options just wait for the levels to hit

You could have a 10000% gain and still end up with a portfolio too small to be trading options

Look at The Strat.

Ignore everyone in this thread. YOU are an idiot. Invest your $100 until you have a profound understanding of certain financial concepts, such as volatility, intrinsic (Delta), and extrinsic (Theta) value and how it affects options pricing, support and resistance (supply and demand) and how it ties into order flow, etc…

YOU are an idiot if you trade options. Do not trade options, you WILL lose your money. New people get lucky, think they have a handle, and then get slaughtered. You will get slaughtered. Invest your $100

Download Tradytics and peruse the delayed listings of Cheaplies. Somebody usually knows something… and if a cheaplies hasn’t moved.. there may be a slim chance there’s a chance. Find ones that are a month plus out.