Everyone, but everyone tells me how tough it is to make a buck in this kind of market. Not so for 60-year-old Sue Carey, an active market player, especially in options, who figures she’s up about $250,000 this year.

Part of those winnings will be used to help realize a dream – namely, to hasten her entry into the city’s live theater scene.

Tomorrow, as part of New York’s annual International Fringe Festival, an annual Big Apple event that kicked off its 16-day run last Friday and will feature 200 theatrical ventures from around the world, a musical which Ms. Carey wrote – “Africa & Plumbridge,” based on her adopted daughter, Africa – will begin a limited five-day engagement at the Players Theatre in lower Manhattan at a cost of about $900,000.The show, entirely financed by Ms. Carey through her stock market prowess, will mark her debut in the city’s theatrical ranks as an executive producer.

It’s the first step in an ambitious effort by a determined woman who has gone from rags to riches and wants to see her play in Broadway lights next year. The Broadway project will run an estimated $5 million and Ms. Carey is already making the rounds in the city’s financial circles to raise the needed capital to make that opening a reality.

That’s no easy challenge, but then again Ms. Carey, married four times and the mother of 11 children – seven biological and four adopted – is used to challenges, very tough ones, in fact. Born in England during World War 11 and a product of poverty and deprivation while living in the London projects, she survived the German blitz and ran away from home when she was 19 to join the Clyde Beatty Cole Bros. circus where she rode bareback, was a trapeze artist (performing without a net), and worked with elephants.

She moved to Chicago in 1964 and became the first woman reporter in the U.S. to bring the commodity markets to television by establishing the first on-air “Ask an Expert” program within the Stock Market Observer, a long-running show that aired over a local Chicago TV station. She later left there to become a full-time stockbroker at a now defunct Chicago brokerage firm.

At the time, she was known as Susan Plumbridge, but later married Tom Carey, her current husband and a member of Chicago’s “Irish business mafia” Carey family that owned a race track in the city, as well as many other businesses. Together, the two have devoted much of their life to philanthropic activities, including hands-on efforts to help homeless and abused children, giving away millions of dollars in the process.

Ms. Carey, who relishes trading stocks and is a skilled options player, thinks the market is in a consolidation phase and is unlikely to go up in any sustained way until Wall Street sees which way the political winds are blowing and how they would impact taxes. To hedge her bets – which she regards as vital in investing in the stock market – she said, “I’m writing call options big time.” Her favorite strategy is to buy a stock and sell a call option against it (the latter a bet the price will fall).Her favorite plays in this context are Comerica, IBM, Elan and General Dynamics.

She also has a modest investment in gold through a commodity hedge fund. “I have a little gold at all times as a hedge,” she noted.

So what’s next for our dynamo? Ms. Carey is working on three additional plays, which she hopes are all Broadway bound. “I’m already seeking financing,” she said, “because, as I’ve told you, I believe you always have to hedge your bets in whatever you do.”

The bottom line: Our one-time trapeze artist is out to fly once again, this time 41 years after her circus days, by using her options skills to get to Broadway.

The odds are clearly against her, as they would be with any new and untried play trying to add its name to Broadway’s theatrical lineup. Based, though, on her life’s achievements, don’t bet against her.