After Swan wrote about “Being the house”, it inspired me to want to leave a thread of this conversation in my blog, to live forever. He’s right. And young inexperienced traders don’t learn quick enough (I’ve watched my friends get burned trying to go long options, time and time again).
But here’s another spin on it, which I think smart investors will agree; naked shorting selling puts INSTEAD OF GOING LONG - rocks. Instead of buying the stock, I hid the bid, on the two or three strike, in the money, front month, puts. This essentially gets me “assigned” the stock later, at a cheaper price than the market would sell it to me at today. Of course, yah a quick move north in the stock will have me ticked off if I don’t get assigned, but manning my positions daily hopefully will compensate for this. Also, you don’t have to front the cash (right away). That means you can be more flexible and use a little margin (with caution) to scale into and out of positions. Essentially, say you know you want to sell stock XYZ and pick up some ABC, well you can short the puts on ABC, and potentially time your sale on XYZ a little better.
Obviously, you have to be careful, and not leverage yourself into naked short selling positions, cause that can be painful. You need to make sure you have the cash available when wicked witch switch day rolls around. But if you didn’t mind going long ABC at $50, you can short the $60 puts for $12, if it falls to $40 you would have lost $10 per share anyway. Shorting the puts, means you only lost $8.
Whenever you do this, it’s easier to tell people, you just “went long”.
Disclosure: Short ABC, and XYZ 
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