Most people should buy long-dated call options:

If you're early career, have a stable job, and have more than ~3 months of savings but not enough to retire, then lifecycle investing already recommends investing very aggressively with leverage (e.g. 2x the S&P 500). This is not speculation, it decreases risk due to diversifying over time. The idea is as a 30yo most of your wealth is still in your future wages, which are only weakly correlated with the stock market, so 2x leverage on your relatively small savings now might still mean under 1x leverage on your effective lifetime portfolio.

In 2026, most of your long-term financial risk comes from your job being automated, which will plausibly happen in the next 5 years. If this happens, your salary will go to zero while the S&P 500 will probably at least double (assuming no AI takeover) [1]. If automation takes 20 years, the present value of your future income is ~10 years of salary. This makes exposure to the market (beta) extremely important. If you have 2 years of salary saved, the required leverage just to break even whether automation takes 5 years or 20 is something like 4x.

However, we can do better; betting that a price movement will happen in a defined time frame is exactly what options are for. We want them to be as long-dated as possible because the market basically expects the economy to be normal forever. So what to actually buy?

• This contract will profit if SPY (which tracks the S&P 500) goes up by more than ~50% in the next 2.5 years. The implied volatility is only 15.4%, which means you don't lose much in expectation if historical trends hold, and the spreads are tight enough that it's easy to buy. Most likely it will expire worthless, but if SPY somehow doubles it will return 80x [2]. [edit: Dec 2028 options are now out, which seem better]
  • To buy them, you need to get options approval from your brokerage (usually level 1 or 2 for long call options), then search for SPY options, select a call option with a strike price of 30-50% above the current price and an expiration date as far in the future as possible, check that the bid-ask spread is acceptably narrow (<10% or so), and submit a market order while the market is open (9:30am-4pm ET weekdays).
  • What to do with them afterwards is out of scope of this post, but there's no need to even look at them more than 1-2 times per year.
• These are SPX index options, which are somewhat tricky to buy [3] but are available 5-6 years out and are therefore far better if you put significant probability on automation between 2.5 and 6 years from now.

Currently I have 30% of my net worth in 2-year SPY options, 30% in semiconductors and the rest in Wealthfront for tax loss harvesting. This is partly for speculation, but it seems reasonable for most people with 2 years of savings to have 10% of their net worth in SPY options or 20% in SPX options [4] for hedging purposes alone.

[1] The S&P 500 is 80% of the US stock market, so probably captures most of the gains of automation. This would fail if most of the gains go to private companies, or if the economy is automated but still only grows at like 10%/year

[2] at current prices, SPY is 683, so if it doubles to 1366 the option will be worth (1366-1000)/4.47 = 81.8x

[3] Spreads are super wide so to get better prices you would want to make a limit order at midpoint and increase the price over a few days. Also not every broker will let you buy them (Fidelity and IBKR work but not Schwab) and 40% of all gains are taxed as short term, unless you buy them in an IRA account.

[4] Higher for SPX options because they're longer dated, so you don't need to roll them forward as frequently.