According to the books I read, most people trade LEAPS as a surrogate for the underlying. So instead of going on margin, you trade LEAPS. Depending on many factors, it maybe cheaper or more expensive than underlying on margins. If this is indeed your objective, you just buy and sit back to watch your strategy unfold. If you guess wrong, even with the long time frame, you may not recover, e.g., if you bought WFM LEAPs a year ago with WFM @ $56, it is unlikely you will recover and you pay a lot of premium for owning LEAPS. So, you say I will short WFM, if you do that, you are actually better off shorting short term WFM options.
If you are a trader like most of us here at ET, do you want to sit on a position for one to two years? The advice I got from here is: Very short term (some people traded intraday or days), there are a lot of noise and uncertainties and new traders most likely cannot handle; very long term too many things can go wrong so perhaps for frequent traders the sweet spot is somewhere in between.
By the way, for equity, most LEAPS are very thinly traded with huge bid/ask spread. So, they are expensive.
I am new, so this is not advice, just "by the book".
