re: Anyone trade these LEAP calls before?

Yes, to answer your question. It allows a long or short position for less capital outlay in its simplest form, and it allows a loss certain in each case. The loss certain is obviously much less than either buying, or short selling the underlying security, or commodity.

It allows a whole bunch of other things as well, but for the average investor, the above explanation is basically it.

Warren Buffett, who has publically said several times derivatives are bad, has interestingly enough also used leap puts extensively. He has hinted in one of his letters that there is opportunity in leaps due to market inefficiencies.

Purchasing a call or put, or leap call or leap put, is one of the safest, most conservative form of investing that there is, contrary to what others have written.

Bigfalla is talking above (loosely) about a bull call calendar spread above. I think what he is referring to is buying higher strike price leap calls, and selling calls monthly at an even higher strike. To oversimplify, the loss potential here is the difference between strike prices.

Selling naked, or partially naked calls is not something most would want to do unless they fully understood what they're doing.

Literally, and it might be too late now, there was leap call opportunity in oil (as a stock option USO) natural gag (as a stock option UNG) and silver (as a stock option SLV). The pricing models were way out of whack, and I traded all three.

So on oil as an example, rather than attempt to guess the bottom for Conco as an example, I went long leaps calls on USO.

Now those are three recent things that aligned perfectly for me. Meaning I thought it was a no brainer, and I follow all three commodities fairly closely.

The way I invest, trade if you want to call it that, might mean in my case, there might not be another opportunity like the above three for several years.