Options trading can be very rewarding. Because options are leveraged instruments they hold the potential for substantial profits or losses in a relatively short period of time. If you are correct on a stock’s direction, and if your timing is good, you can do quite well. However, because options are a decaying asset that loses value over time, you have to be disciplined.
First, what are options? There are two types: puts and calls. A ‘put’ option gives the buyer the right to *sell* 100 shares of a certain stock at a certain price by a certain date. A ‘call’ option is the opposite — it gives the buyer the right to *buy* 100 shares of stock at a certain price by a certain date. In both cases the ‘certain price’ is called ’strike price’ and the ‘certain date’ is the ‘expiration date’ of the option.
Options trading is done for many reasons. Typically people buy puts as insurance; you know you will always receive at least the strike price for your stock. Other people use calls and puts for short-term speculation where they feel strongly about a stock rising or falling in a short period of time. And, lastly, some investors (and professional traders) use the option’s time decay to generate recurring monthly income.
When trading options there is a fundamental question of whether or not you should be a buyer or a seller of options. You can make money both ways but since options are a zero-sum game and the fact that the majority of options held until expiration expire worthless, the odds are in your favor if you are a seller of options instead of a buyer.
The simplest, most popular, and most conservative strategy for selling options is called ‘covered calls’ — a situation where an investor owns 100 or more shares of an underlying stock and then sells call options against that position. If the stock is above the strike price of the call option on expiration day then the investor can either buy the option back (if he wants to hold on to his stock) or let it get called away (where the buyer of the option will ‘exercise’ his right and force the seller of the option to sell him 100 shares at the previously agreed upon strike price).
You can generate monthly income from stocks you already own by selling call options against them each month. In exchange for putting a cap on your upside, you receive some downside protection (from the call premium you receive when you sell the call option). If the stock drops by less than the amount of premium you receive then you will still make money (and, of course, if the stock stays flat or goes up you will make money, too). This is one of the most appealing aspects of covered calls — the fact that you can make money in up, down, or sideways markets.
Investing with covered calls is not difficult. It is usually the first strategy people learn when they begin with options. It can be time consuming, though, if you don’t have a good covered call screener to help you. A good screener will scan the universe of possible trades and alert you as to where the high yield opportunities are. The alternative of using a spreadsheet to calculate possible trades is, at best, incomplete and laborious.
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