You still pay a lot in IV even if you do a spread, i.e. the reward/risk is not that great (2022 puts on SPCE have an IV in excess of 100%... that's too much for me). And I don't have the stomach to sell options. But that's all my opinion, go ahead and do it if you think it makes sense.

You pay IV on one side and get it back on the other, don't you? AIUI high IV just means the spread won't start "paying off" until closer to expiry.

> You pay IV on one side and get it back on the other, don't you?

No. You get less on the other side. You should look up Black-Scholes to understand how option pricing works.

A put option's value comes from integrating the underlying lognormal distribution between 0 and the strike price. A spread's value comes from integrating the underlying distribution between the two spread strikes. Both heavily depend on IV (i.e. the sigma of the log-normal distribution).

Also, always think about the guy on the other side of the trade. Why would he sell you a spread cheaply if it's obvious that the underlying is very shitty and volatile? Options are bets on the probability distribution of some asset. High IV means "anything is possible". And if anything is possible then it stands that there's little money to be made on a move like "give me insurance against it going up/down". There is some money to be made on "I can underwrite the risk of it going down/up", i.e. on selling the options, i.e. selling the IV.

There are always the 3x leveraged ETFs, kinda work like LEAPS lite

This is really quite different, and is actually in practice more similar to selling options because of the bad effects of increased volatility. They massively underperform under heightened volatility, simulations are right there in prospectuses (in fact I'd go as far as to say that their expected value is 0 over the long run, but like very long, maybe 10-30 years). And yes you should always read the specs/prospectuses/10-Ks of the contracts/funds/companies that you buy.