A recent article about General Electric (GE), written by Motley Fool, caught my attention and inspired me to explore some long-term investing opportunities in this company's securities. What I liked the most about the story is that it outlines a few strategic competitive advantages that GE has over its competitors. For example, with the acquisition of Alstom Power, the company will be able to not only service its own equipment sold to third parties (as it usually does at high margins) but also service equipment of its competitors like Honeywell (HON) and Siemens (SIEGY). This will enable the industrial giant to get to know more about its competitors' technologies and extend its competitive advantage over them even further. We also know that General Electric is a pioneer in the Industrial Internet of Things business, which should become a significant driver of its revenues in the next few years as the concept becomes more widely-used on a global scale. In general, it looks like the company is winning in the long-run.In addition, we can see that GE's shares have been rising steadily over the years (about 3% a year on average, dividends excluded) with a small standard deviation: $GE, GE Aerospace / 10080 The volatility has somewhat increased over the last year, according to historical daily returns' data:(Source: Google Finance. Calculations by author)The increase in the volatility is attributable to a few events, including the overall market meltdown in January 2016 and the recent Brexit-related shakeup. The stock can be also viewed as a volatile stock during earnings periods.I am particularly happy when I am able to find cheap long-duration options. The reason is simple: asymmetric risk-reward ratios. With longer-term options I get a stock-like exposure to the underlying while I also become open to fundamental drivers affecting the price of the security over a longer time period (over a year, which is quite a long time for options). Here is what I mean in the case of General Electric:(Source: optionsprofitcalculator.com)Essentially, as you can see in the table above, I only need about $0.54 to buy the stock north of $35 per share. My profit is locked at $37 per share, which provides an appealing risk-reward ratio (almost 3:1):(Source: optionsprofitcalculator.com)I can sit on the position for almost 1.5 years at a fraction of the cost of the actual shares with a very limited downside risk. Although investors may be uncomfortable with the fact that the spread consists of out-of-money options, there is one thing they have to know with this trade: the break-even point ($35.55 per share) is only about 12% higher than the current market price of the stock. This is well in the annual one-standard deviation window (almost 22%, according to data above). Hence, chances are in favor of the option investors in this case. In addition, the ~3:1 risk-reward ratio is more than compensating for this type of trades.What do you think?