Starting an options portfolio today

I am starting an options portfolio to get practice on trading options. The link will be next to my stock transactions worksheet. I will keep the option trades simple and hold or sell no more than four options at any time. I will be using options on SPY that have high volume and whose spread are no more than 5% of the price. I spent this weekend reviewing my books on options trading and a lot of help from Sean, and I came to the conclusion that fancy strategies are not my cup of tea. I will be using single option buys or sells, just like stocks SSO and SDS. All the straddles and butterflies are out. My trades will be clean. When I determine that I need to be long I will buy a call option (in three or four steps of 1/3 or 1/4 each trade) which has a chance of giving me a decent leverage and is not too expensive when it comes to spread. I will be using steps to get in the market just to make sure that my trades are keeping sync with the current trend of the market. I will be using 20% of my current net worth on this site, approx. $20,000 towards this activity. So, in the end my options trades will not have too much of an impact in case of total loss. I will be looking for options on www.yahoo.com. I will not analyze my options about their intrinsic value and other fancy parameters since I will be using price and volume actions of SP500 for guidance with a little bit more reliance on MACD than before since I believe that may help me from running into a disaster. With options, it is more important to aviod disasters than with regular stocks. I will be experimenting with all three types of options - out of money, at money and in the money. A good question is whether my performance will be better if I use 3x leveraged BGU and BGZ as suggested by Stockboss. I don't have time today, but I will be inclined to get that going also as an experimental stuff. In that case it may be desirable to trade 1/3+1/3+1/3 ladder up and 1/3+1/3+1/3 ladder down rather than 1/2+1/2 I have been using with SSO and SDS. With options the leverage can be even more if I use out-of-money options. I will see how these speculative stuff work out.

Current position of trade in SSO and SDS portfolio: Lighten up from the long side by selling 1/2 position. That will keep me market 1x long rather than 2x long, aligning the portfolio to the mood of the market.