Hogwash, Dew? The only possible bit of hogwash in what you quoted was my assumption, evidently unwarranted, that "I'm sure you know the options game as well as anyone ...." Obviously you don't, and your aversion is such that, not only do you not want to think about it, you don't particularly want others thinking about it, either. Despite all the words, you never even attempted to address my simple comments that: 1) selling married calls is a risk-reduction technique not suitable for sarcastic references to "excitement"; and 2) selling calls generates income.
"If one cannot tolerate the risk of owning X shares of MNTA outright, then one can reduce the risk by simply owning Y shares ...." Well, duh; yes, one can, or one can flee the stock market. Why you think such a course is morally superior to selling calls, however, I find mysterious, and your attitude certainly evidences something like a religious or moral belief of the "Just say no!" variety.
"Most investors who play with options will end up losing money as a result ...." You cite (because you have) no evidence for this, but I'll accept it anyway. You, then, need to accept the fact that the same is true for those who dabble in the stock market, particularly biotech investing. "Straight" investing is certainly no less prone to loss than hedged investing, and most dabblers lose in either case. In my experience, in fact (recognizing I have no more evidence than the null amount you presented), most active investors lose in the long run. I don't find this a good reason for dismissing discussion of anything but plain vanilla strategies.
"... investors can’t ascertain the timing of market-moving events as well as they think they can." Bingo! Of course they can't, and of course, the people trying to ascertain timing are the options buyers. Selling calls can, and should, be divorced almost completely from timing considerations.
"Show me an option strategy for MNTA and in almost every case I’ll show you an optionless strategy that works as well or better once you dispense with the pretenses about event timing." No, I'm not going to lay out a thirty-transaction history that can be picked apart post facto; such post-mortems are pointless and never quantify the value of the possible bad outcomes that were avoided along the way. Using that same methodology, I could easily show you, for any optionless strategy, an options strategy that would at least double the gains or halve the losses of any "optionless" strategy (and those "pretenses about event timing" are entirely on the side of the call buyer, not the seller, as I just pointed out).
Finally, Dew, if the efficient-market hypothesis is the foremost piece of B.S. ever promulgated in any area of human knowledge, the philosophy of buy-and-hold must be a close runner-up. We know that in the long, long run, every company fails, and the market consists only of those that haven't failed yet. Given sufficient time, every "just buy-and-hold" strategy will lose all the money invested except for the dividends thrown off.
If all options strategies were as dismal as you paint them, there would be little of an options market, and no options market-makers, since those who perform that function would be able to deploy their money more profitably in other market activities.
Understanding that you don't like discussions like this on your message board and don't consider the use of options to be "investing", I'll desist from such posts in the future, even as I continue to make money from those enthusiasts who are always alert for stocks prices that are "going to the moon", always soon and suddenly (may such investors never disappear!), and I will always be looking to stocks overtaken by irrational exuberance in selecting the candidates for options writing. Right now, I think MNTA fits that category (for reasons I even quantified in my prior post), although not quite as admirably as DNDN--but that is, naturally, arguable until we can look back and see how the stock prices actually unfolded.
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