Mobile apps help here, but you can also set options to automatically sell if they hit a certain price point (you can set max, min, etc). So for example you think a certain stock, let's say BARF, is going to increase. It's currently at $10, and you think that with everyone staying home or losing their jobs more people will be using BARF, thus increasing their price. But by how much? Let's say you think BARF will hit $12 by June. So you buy a call, which is a bet that the stock will go up, with a strike of $12 and expiration date of 6/19. This option costs you $0.50 for a 100 shares contract, so $50 total (0.5 * 100). After you purchase it and the order fills (meaning, you placed your order, and someone decided to sell you the contract for $50), you can immediately turn around and place it back on the market saying "if the value of this option contract hits $0.60, sell it." Well, wheelie Wednesday is right out and let's say there's a spike in traffic today because Stanley Roberts encourages people to spend time on BARF instead of going out joyriding, and correspondingly, the stock price gets a bump up to $11. It's not quite at $12 yet, but the upward momentum bumps up your contract value a little bit to where your option is now worth $0.60 since it looks like BARF will indeed hit $12 long before June. Since you had the order to sell pending, and your condition was met, it executes, someone buys it, and you just made a small gain of about $10.
Multiply that out by however many contracts you buy, subtract your premiums, and that's how you make a bit of scratch doing this.
On the other hand, there's a lot of risk involved too - let's say you think it's going to go up but it goes down instead. And never comes back above the price of what you bought it for - maybe Budman gets arrested for fraud, maybe he enables ads, either way BARF tanks down to $5. Your option contract now may be worthless, but it also may expire and you get assigned. This means you're now on the hook to buy those 100 shares of BARF at a higher price than they're worth, so you lose a lot more than $50.
I'm probably not doing the greatest job explaining options here, Entoptic may be able to flesh it out more, but that's the gist of what I posted above. You can buy options that expire tomorrow, next week, next month, whatever, at the beginning of the day, and sell them by the end of the day if they go up. Hold for another day if they don't. I'm only playing with small money here, there are guys who throw around hundreds of thousands or even millions on this stuff. I've grown about $1k starting to around $3500 but I treat it like gambling for now - if I lose it all, I lose it all, and sit on my hands for a bit.
