Index Roll

You don't want to bother picking individual stocks. You want to tie your money to moves in the overall market. Essentially, you want to invest in the fortunes of an index (which, if you don't know, are tracking mechanisms that represents a basket of stocks, allowing investors to follow either the overall market or a particular segment).

Index roll provides one possible strategy to marry your investment fortunes with a particular index. The process involves LEAPS, or Long-term Equity AnticiPation Securities. These contracts represent options that have longer-term expiration dates, ones of more than a year.

The "roll" part comes in by continually replacing these LEAPS as expirations comes up. You keep exchanging one for another with an expiration date further into the future. Like...on a rolling basis.

By purchasing a rolling series of LEAPS for the same index, you can track the moves in the underlying index. Meanwhile, because of the structure of option contracts, the strategy gives the opportunity to outperform the index by taking advantage of leverage. LEAPS are cheaper than purchasing a corresponding ETF outright, meaning that you can increase the gains using the index roll structure.