Covered calls in roller coaster markets

The covered call is similar to naked put, both in premium and risk. Except that, you have an ability to convert your stock holding to a long-term gain.

Remember the covered call, has only limited upside but a significant downside, like some event causing the stock go down 20%. So you need to have the level at which you will close the trade.

Also, this is something most option traders and I do all the time. When you calculate the premium as annualized yield, sometime it drop because of time decay, or because the stock has moved up, or some catalyst has passed and the premium compresses. So you roll it to a different calendar and strike to get higher annualized yield.

When you don’t find a good alternative, close early because that lets you to deploy the cash elsewhere or to reduce the risk.

Generally I prefer bit boring name (or with less volatility) and downside protection if I am doing a covered call. With high volatility names like $PLTR, I prefer to do spreads. With spreads you have defined risk and return. More important is limit your downside. For ex: $PLTR can easily drop to $100, $80 and still be wildly overvalued. The premium you earn will not be enough to mitigate that kind of stock decline.

Even if you want to do wheel strategy with weeklies, my recommendation is, buy 2 or 3 months out call and then sell weeklies against it.

When you are trading options, or for that matter in trading, managing the risk is most important. If you ignore risk, all your profits can be easily wiped out in a single trade.

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