I don’t know what your actual question is, so I’m not sure what to say.

If your question is “Can I take some of my money and bet on companies/markets and earn something from that?” then the answer is “Sure, but don’t expect to become wealthy quickly or at all because it’s much harder than you think to do this and be consistently profitable.” It’s easy to point to some of the examples you’ve listed and think about how well you could have done, but hindsight is 20/20, and traders make plenty of losing bets as well.

Yes, there are ways to reduce the downside risk in these trades, but I still would not recommend “casual trading” for most people unless it’s a small percentage of your total assets. It is extremely difficult to follow and successfully bet on individual companies, deals, etc. unless it is your full-time job.

Call options on Tesla and GameStop during the squeezes, puts on blackberry when the iPhone comes out, snatching up zero coupon bonds before the fed lowers rates when Covid happens and then selling them and going long the cloud, etc

Do you think this is a viable strategy? If so, would you use anything more exotic then basic calls and puts for limited downside with unlimited upside?

I feel like super specialized skills are not necessary and perhaps even harmful for this kind of strategy. You don’t need aadvanced accounting like the pure play value guys, and you don’t need stochastic finance like the quants. Just the basics of everything molded into a lattice work of mental models per Charlie Munger.

What do you think of this?