Understanding Covered Calls

Why Understanding Covered Calls is Essential to Success

Understanding covered calls and the alternative ways you can use them, is essential if you wish to make consistent profits from this popular option trading strategy. For example, you need to have some idea about where the current price of the underlying financial instrument is, both within its own long term trading cycle and in the wider context of the overall market. Once you have established this, you can then tailor your covered call writing strategy to either trade conservatively or aggressively.

You can trade covered calls on both individual stocks and index options. If you’re using individual stocks then you should subscribe to a service that provides good fundamental analysis of companies. so that you can focus on stocks whose price action is expected to at least remain stable in the short term. Unexpected company news, or earnings reports can create “surprises” that can produce volatile price action. Understanding covered calls and how to avoid the potential dangers associated with sudden price falls, is essential to success.

If you prefer a covered call strategy that focuses on indexes such as the Dow, the S&P500, Russell 2000 or Nasdaq 100 then you should look at the Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) whose portfolio of shares are linked to the price action of these indexes. Their options are far more liquid and much cheaper than the indexes themselves, thus allowing greater flexibility with regard to position sizing. You simply need to assess the overall market direction and adopt positions that reflect whether the market as a whole is bullish, bearish or trading sideways.

Understanding Covered Calls – The Conservative Approach

We mention this one first, since it’s probably more important to know how to reduce risk and still make reasonable profits. If you’re selling covered calls in a bear market, the best way to do this, is to buy the underlying and then sell deep-in-the-money call options. Most of the premium will be comprised of ‘intrinsic value’ but there will also be some ‘time value’ there as well. This is your intial profit. If the price of the underlying continues to fall, it will have to be significant to threaten your profitability. At this point, you can then buy back your original sold calls for a profit and then sell more at a lower strike price – thus adding to your profits and protecting yourself at the same time.

Understanding Covered Calls – The Aggressive Approach

You would use this strategy when you believe the price of the underlying is either going to remain stable or rise, in the short term. The more aggressive approach involves purchasing the underlying and then selling out-of-the-money call options. The plan is, that you will reduce your entry price by the amount of option premium you receive – and if the price continues north, you will sell the shares at expiration date and also make a gain on them.

If the share price hasn’t breached the exercise price of the sold call options, you can keep the shares and sell more call options for the next month out. If the exercise price HAS been breached, you may be forced to sell your shares but you make a gain on them (limited to the difference between the original purchase price and the exercise price of the options) plus you keep the call option premiums.

There is greater financial risk involved with the more aggressive strategy. If the price of the stock drops instead of remains where it is, you may make a loss. If you choose to hang onto the shares in the hope of a price rebound, you can buy back the sold options and sell more at a lower strike price. This may not entirely offset the loss on the shares if the price fall is significant though.

If understanding covered calls is important to you, you may wish to take a look at the Covered Calls Coaching program.