Bloomberg: David Siniapkin, a postal worker in York, Pennsylvania, uses some of his retirement money to trade options. After three years and being down as much as $10,000, he’s broken even.

“I’ll do the iron condors, I’ll do calendars, I like double diagonals,” said Siniapkin, 46, who said he has had “mixed success” with these strategies, known as multi-leg transactions, which involve buying or selling multiple contracts on the same underlying security.

“Trading options is one of the all-time suckers’ bets,” said Whitney Tilson, founder of hedge fund T2 Partners LLC, based in New York.

Regulators permit trading options using retirement accounts, said Herb Perone, spokesman for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Certain trading may violate Internal Revenue Service rules, which is why firms including Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, E*Trade, Interactive Brokers Group Inc. and OptionsXpress Holdings Inc. prevent investors from executing strategies that may cause an IRA to go into debt, according to the companies. Full Story

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