Selling covered calls is sometimes compared to taking out a limited insurance policy on your stocks, except that you get paid to take out this policy.

How? If you own a stock with options available, you can sell an option to call, (buy), your shares away from you at a given price, known as the strike price.

You’ll receive money, called a premium, for selling a call option. In fact, you’ll often receive a bigger $ amount per share by selling a call premium than you’re currently receiving as a dividend. This money reduces your net cost basis on the stock, hence the insurance analogy.

What’s the catch? By selling the call option, you’re obligating yourself to deliver x amount of shares of the underlying stock at a specific price – the strike price.

Each option contract corresponds to 100 shares of the underlying stock, so make sure that you own at least 100 shares of the stock BEFORE you try to sell calls against it.

Here are a few basic option terms that will help explain this option strategy:

Strike Price: The price attached to a given option contract, that a call seller is obligated to sell the underlying stock at to the buyer.

Call Bid Premium: The amount of $/share that call buyers are currently offering, (Bidding), for a given call option.

Expiration Date: The date that an option expires, which is normally on the 3rd Friday of the option’s contract month.

Option Chain: The listing of options available for a stock. These are arranged by calendar month. Normally, the months available revolve throughout the year: the front (current) month, the next month, one month per quarter, and the following January. Some more heavily traded stocks have more months available simultaneously.

What triggers the sale of your shares when you sell covered calls? If the price of the underlying stock rises to or past the combination of the strike price and the call premium you were paid, your shares will usually be “assigned”, (sold).

If you sold a $15 January call option and received $1.25, your shares would be assigned if the stock rose to or above $16.25.

Assignment normally happens at or near the expiration date.

Assigned Yield: The % yield a call seller receives when his shares assigned, calculated as follows: The difference between his basis cost on the underlying shares and the call’s strike price he sold at, dividend by his cost basis.

For example, if you sold that $15 call, and your cost basis on the stock was $14.00, you’d earn an additional $1.00/share, if your shares were assigned, which would equal an assigned yield of 7.14%. ($1.00 dividend by cost of $14.00).

Call Yield: The yield that the call seller receives for the call, calculated as follows: The call premium divided by the cost basis/share of the underlying shares.

In the above example, the call seller sold a call for $1.25, and the cost basis of the stock was $14.00. Therefore, his Static Yield equals 8.93%, ($1.25 divided by $14.00)

Most covered call sellers compare the amount of dividends they’d receive prior to the call’s expiration, to the amount of call premium they’d receive, to judge if it’s worth selling the call option or not.

Total Assigned Yield: The total of the dividends received, call premium received, and assigned yield received, all dividend by your cost basis of the stock.

In this example, if you’d received $.60/share in dividends during the investment term, plus $1.25 in call premium, plus $1.00 assigned yield differential, you’re total income on the trade would be $2.85, on a $14.00 stock. This equals a 20.36% Total Assigned Yield.

Total Static Yield: This is the combination of the dividends received or qualified for prior to expiration, plus the call premium received.

A Static Yield occurs when the stock DOESN’T rise to a price that is equal to or over the combination of the strike price and call premium, and the call seller’s shares are not sold.

To sum up, you can add up to 2 new income streams to your dividend income on any optionable stock, by selling covered calls against it.

We took a stock with a $.60 dividend, (a 4.3% dividend yield), and earned over twice as much $ in call premiums immediately, $1.25, (8.93% call yield), plus, we positioned ourselves for an additional $1.00/share if assigned, (7.14% assigned yield).

In fact, there are two types of options that are call and put option. Call option gives its owner the right to buy 100 units of share of a company at a specified price that has been agreed between the call option owner and the seller within certain period of time. So, within this period of time, if the stock price goes up, the call option price will also go up and vice versa. The second type of option is put option. This option gives its owner the right to sell 100 units of share of a company at a specified price that has been agreed between the put option owner and the seller within certain period of time. Put option seems like the opposite of call option. If the stock price goes up within this period of time, the put option price will go down. Either call or put option can be bought or sold. As long as there are people willing to sell, there will be people willing to buy. There are four permutations that are possible exist during the transaction of an option. The first one is buying a call option meaning that buy the right for yourself to buy 100 units of share. Second is selling call option meaning that sell the right to buy 100 units share from you to someone else. The third one is buying a put option meaning that buy the right for yourself to sell 100 units of shares. The last one is selling a put option meaning that sell the right to sell 100 units of share to you to someone else.

The other way to make these differences clearer is always remember that the call option buyer hopes the stock price will go up and the put option buyer looking for the price per share to fall. For the opposite side, a call option seller is hoping the stock price will maintain or fall. Whereas, put option seller is hoping that the stock price will go up. If the option buyer no matter dealing with the calls or puts option is correctly predicting the price movement of the stock, then they will gain profit from their action. For option, there is another obstacle we have to face besides estimating the direction of the stock price movement. This obstacle is that the change of the stock price has to be taken place before the deadline of the option. As a stockholder, we may be able to predict a stock’s long-term prospects by waiting for a long-term change of the stock. However, for option holder, we may not have that kind of opportunity. This is because options are finite; they will lose all their value within a short period of time, usually within a few months. However, it has long-term options that can last up to one to three years. Due to this limitation, time will be an important factor to determine whether an option buyer can earn a profit or not.

Foremost, option is granting the buyer an intangible right to buy or sell 100 units of share at an agreed price between the buyer and seller of the option. Therefore, option is just an agreement regarding to 100 units of share of a specific stock and to a specific price per share. Therefore, if the buyer buys an option at the wrong timing, then, the buyer will not able to make any profit. Wrong timing means that the stock price does not move or does not move substantially when the deadline has arrived. When we buy a call option, it seems like we are agreeing that we are willing to pay the price that being asked to acquire a contractual right. The right provided that we may buy 100 units of share of stock at a specified fixed price per share, and this right exists at the time we purchased the option until the deadline of the option. Within the time we purchased the option until the deadline of the option, if the stock price goes up more than the fixed price indicated in the option agreement, this call option will become more valuable. Just think that we buy a call option that granting us the right to buy 100 units of shares at the price of USD 70 per share. Let said before the option deadline, the stock price has gone up to USD 90 per share. As an owner of this call option, we have the right to buy 100 units of share at USD 70, which is USD 20 less than the current market price. This is the situation when stock market price is more than the fixed contractual price indicated in the call option contract. In this example, we as buyer would have the right to buy 100 units share, which is USD 20 less than current market price. Although we own the right to do so, we may unnecessarily to execute our right. For an example, how about if the stock price has gone down to USD 50. We would not have to buy shares at the fixed price of USD 70 and we could select not to take any action.

If you are going to invest in the stock market, I believe you need a much more hands-on approach than buy-and-hold. Even so, a few hours portfolio management per week beats a full-time job. With a more active approach, investing in the stock market can be a wealth-building programme, not just a place to park your existing funds with a view to a slightly better return than the banks will produce.

There are many different approaches to managing your investments rather than buy-and-hold. One area worth looking at is options trading – when you buy options, you are not acquiring the stocks themselves, you are buying the right to make an agreed trade at some point in the future. This can be used when the stock values go up OR down, by buying the right kind of option. There are 2 basic kinds of options:

Call options – these give you the right, but not the obligation, to buy shares at an agreed price on or before an agreed expiry date. If the actual price of the shares rises above the price agreed in the option, then the holder of the option can make a profit by buying the shares at the option price, and immediately selling them at the higher market price. But there is no need to do this buy/sell transaction, since the option itself has an intrinsic value in this situation and can itself be traded.Put options – these give you the right, but not the obligation, to sell shares at an agreed price on or before an agreed expiry date. If the actual price of the shares falls below the price agreed in the option, then the holder of the option can make a profit by buying the shares at the market price and immediately selling them at the higher option price. Again, there is no need to do this buy/sell transaction, since the option itself has an intrinsic value in this situation and can itself be traded.

Because options values vary with the margin between the market price and the agreed option price, the option prices change by a much greater percentage than the prices of the shares themselves. It is not at all uncommon for options to change 50% in a week – 3 of my last 5 trades have gained over 50% in a week.

There’s a lot to learn about option trading, but for the small investor I recommend taking a look at this as an active investment strategy in preference to the passive buy-and-hold approach.