The biggest downside of covered calls is their lack of downside protection on the underlying. A big, but not unusually big correction can wipe out many months worth of profits. One strategy for reducing this exposure is to buy puts, but when I have looked into this strategy in the past the puts were either so expensive they ate up all the profits, or they were so far out of the money that they didn’t offer much protection. I have found that the best way to really appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of a strategy is to have money at stake, so I started to look for a good situation to do some hedging on a covered call position.
Last Monday, August 9th I felt there was a higher than normal risk of a market pullback, but there was still the opportunity for making some good profits on the weekly options. Some downside protection seemed like a good idea, and the OTM 111 puts were attractively priced at 0.35. Late on the 9th I bought SPY at 113.01, sold-to-open 13-Aug 113 calls at 0.90, and bought 13-Aug 111 puts 0.35. Maximum profit on this trade was 0.55 per share, and worst case loss was 1.46. I had given up 39% of the profit to decrease the downside risk from essentially the entire value of the underlying to 1.46 per share. Since there was only 4 days left on this trade the remaining 0.48% profit potential was still attractive.
The market dropped off sharply on the 10th. In cases like this I will often buy back the calls. If I think the market is going to keep going down I’ll then sell ATM calls to harvest more premium, or if I think there will be a bounce back I’ll wait to re-sell the calls, hoping to sell them again at a higher price than I just bought them back at. In this case I bought back the 13-Aug 113 calls at .53, and later in the day resold them for .79 when the market did rebound a bit.
Wednesday the market really blew off. I bought back my 13-Aug 113 calls at 0.12 and quickly sold 13-Aug 111 calls at 0.61 which I bought back later in day for 0.39.
Thursday I sold 13-Aug 110 calls at 0.22 and bought them back later at 0.13
Friday I closed out the position early because I was not going to be able to monitor the position the rest of the day, selling the SPY at 108.61 (down 4.40 per share) and selling the 13-Aug 111 puts at 2.22 (up 1.87 per share)– I left about 0.2 on the table with the puts because I didn’t wait until near close to sell them.
In spite of all my call maneuvererings (which were all profitable) I was still down 1.18 per share, compared to the worst case loss of 1.46 from just holding the position. If I had not purchased the puts I would have been down 3.5 per share, almost triple the loss I ended up with.
