After several sell-off days with low volume, the buyers seem to be coming back. I bought SPY at 105.22, sold 27-Aug 106 calls at 0.58. Breakeven is 104.64. Maximum profit is $1.36 per share. Livevol shows the 27-Aug 106 IV’s at 28 and the 18-Sept monthly IV for the 106 calls at 24. Right now, Livevol’s IV numbers are the only ones I believe for …
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, …
Update Well, I was clearly wrong about people not being in panicky mood. Around 10:30 EST the market decided to take another leg down and the VIX did spike up quite a bit. Later in the day the market rallied back to around the point I created this position. I bailed out of my position less than an hour after I created it, …
I’ve been staying out of the market (except for USO), because I think the possibility of a pullback is fairly high. However, with two days to go on the SPY Weekly 6-August options (which are showing IVs in the 30s) things started looking attractive. I created an ITM covered call position, buying SPY at 112.45 and selling 111 strike calls at 1.84. …
After creating a position with SPY on Wednesday at 111.07 I added to my covered calls on Thursday, buying SPY at 110.12, selling 110 strike calls at 0.71. At one point this morning (Friday) , when SPY was off to about 109.5 my 111 strike calls had dropped from Wednesday’s 0.83 to 0.08. These strong moves are characteristic of options with only a …
