Home The Options Strategy Series
Called Away: Covered Calls for Income
A Risk-First Guide to Writing Calls on Stocks You Already Own
Turn the shares you already own into a steady stream of income, and keep doing it for years without giving away your best gains.
A covered call is a genuine income engine and a real trade-off.
Covered calls are one of the most widely used income strategies an ordinary investor can run. Professionals and institutions have used them for decades, and an entire family of funds is built on nothing else. Done with discipline, they can pay you month after month on stocks you intend to hold anyway, lower the effective cost of your positions over time, and bring a welcome selling discipline to a portfolio.
What this book won't do is sell you the fantasy. The promise of “risk-free rental income” is a half-truth, and it's exactly what trips up new call writers. You collect a premium today in exchange for capping your upside if the stock takes off. Master both halves and the strategy becomes a paycheck you can run for decades. Ignore the second half, and a single runaway stock can quietly undo a year of gains.
It's a clear, jargon-light guide for the investor who already owns shares and wants to put them to work: how the trade actually behaves, which holdings make good candidates and which to leave alone, and how to collect premium while protecting the gains that matter. You'll see the strategy work in plain numbers, and you'll learn to recognize the handful of situations where writing a call costs more than it pays, so you can simply step aside.
Inside the book
- Generating steady premium income from stocks you already own, step by step
- Picking candidates: the mature, range-bound, dividend-paying shares where covered calls shine
- Choosing strikes and expirations that balance income now against the headroom you want to keep
- Reading a premium as a real return on capital, and knowing when it's rich enough to write
- An entry checklist so every trade is one you'd make on your calmest day
- Managing an open position, rolling up and out, and treating being called away as a planned exit
- The wheel: selling puts to buy back in and calls to get paid on the way out
- Sizing the strategy so you still take part in the occasional big year
- The tax side of being called away, and the discipline that makes the income last
Look inside
A few pages from the paperback. Select a page to see it full size.
- The contents
- The opening of Chapter 1
- Figure 1.1: the shape of a covered call
- Figure 14.1: sizing within the writable sleeve
Who it's for
Investors who already own shares they plan to hold and want them to earn income without surrendering their best gains.
