Then there's the other problem: the millenials are living through the worst economic depression since the Great Depression. They saw the economy collapse and take out their parents 401ks which they had build for decades overnight. It's no mystery why they aren't interested in playing the sucker's game with the precious little money they have.
Then there's the third problem: we're due for another crash. It's been 7 years or so since the last one, and that duration of time is very typical from the market's peak to peak and trough to trough. Nothing has been fixed. Smart people have smelled this coming for over a year. It's a horrendously bad time to invest.
Notice how that's no less informed about the future than your wild speculation?
The reality is that outside of a few people, the last crash was largely unanticipated. Just as with that crash, the next one is likely to be another black swan event we cannot predict.
Black swan events don't stick to a schedule and you can't time the market.
To imply my prediction is wild speculation is, heh, well, let's just watch the markets.
Quite honestly if I was a millennial (I'm close), I would not even be thinking about saving, let alone gambling on the stock market, given today's economy. My financial worries would be about exorbitant, growing rent payments, the huge burden of student debt, a dim and worsening job market, automation (which hits low-skill and low-experience workers hardest) and the disappearing opportunity to own a home and start a stable family.
Telling millennials to gamble their nonexistent disposable income on Wall Street financial products is kind of tone deaf, given the economic outlook for this generation.
Maybe once there is stability again there will be investment from millenials. Otherwise, it's another laughable instance of Wall Street not understanding Main Street, as trite as it sounds.
Essentially I know a lot of retail investors that if you told them "Would you sell this stock if it went up by 20% in the next 6 months?" they would answer "yes" and they might even put in a market limit order ahead of time, but they don't ever sell covered calls. A nice interface for this could really help retail investors.
The service is meant to solve the problem demonstrated by a recent Goldman Sachs survey: only 18% of millenials think that the stock market is the "best way to save for the future". If someone can figure out how to get more millenials investing, they could make money off commission, brokerage fees and the like.
First problem: Options are usually built for savvy investors who operate on short-mid term time horizons and with volatile/uncertain underlying assets. Not millenials who want to earn market returns through an ETF or hand-picked portfolio of blue chips + hot tech stocks. Options are not a solution for long-term investment strategies - diversified portfolios, index funds, and ETFs are.
Second problem: If I really cared enough to add some downside protection to going long on Google, Coke, Visa, etc. I would literally just google "how to place a stop loss order etrade" and find this article [1] that describes how to set up an automatic limit: enter stopping price, specify whether it's a stop on quote or stop on limit order, specify whether to buy or to sell, specify how many shares, execute. So why would I pay a non-negligible percentage of my upside on top of the option premium for something that I could do myself in literally 2 minutes?
The reason we don't trust the stock market is because the financial sector has a reputation for greed, corruption, and manipulation which will inevitably lead to another economic calamity coupled with a stock market crash. Making options marginally more accessible to casual investors is not coming close to solving this problem.
[1] https://us.etrade.com/e/t/prospectestation/help?id=130102000...