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What are the advantages of lowering risk by buying puts over lowering risk by holding cash?

It seems OP is trying to hedge savings in the form of RSUs granted by his employer. Since they can't be sold yet cash isn't an option (pun unintended).

Money's fungible. Hold some cash that you save from your paycheck rather than donating it.

(Little too late to do this for the OP, but it's pretty good advice for anyone else thinking of doing this.)

The OP probably can't cash out on the RSUs at this point, and options plays are like shooting fish in a barrel at the moment. Remember that the hard part of an options play is knowing when something is going to happen with a fair amount of accuracy, but there probably won't be a miraculous recovery of the market in the next 24-48 hours.

No, the hard part of trading anything is having edge over other people. Options are not priced assuming there will be a "miraculous recovery" in the next 24 hours. They're priced based on the world's expectation of future volatility, through a very competitive market mechanism. There is no reason to assume you have better insight than people who model this stuff full-time.

It's irresponsible to suggest that making money trading is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Best case, it's a slightly negative EV gamble with high variance.

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