Learn options selling

Written for the seller, not the buyer. Most options education explains how to buy a call and hope. This series covers the other side: collecting premium, what you give up to collect it, and the arithmetic that tells you whether a given trade was worth doing.

Covered calls, in full

Fourteen articles, live now. Start with the covered calls pillar if you want them in a sensible order.

• The covered call, end to end
• The covered call payoff, in three zones
• Picking a strike: what each delta actually buys
• Choosing an expiry: weekly, monthly or 45 days
• Annualizing a covered call, correctly
• Static return vs if-called return
• Covered calls on a stock you do not want to sell
• Rolling a covered call: up, out, and up-and-out
• When rolling a covered call is a mistake
• Covered calls and dividends
• The covered call ladder
• Covered calls vs just holding: the honest comparison
• The poor man's covered call, and what it really costs
• Covered calls into earnings

Coming next

The rest of the series is being written and published cluster by cluster rather than dumped in one go. Cash-secured puts is next.

• Cash-secured putsGetting paid to set a limit order, capital requirements, strike selection, rolling down and out.
• The wheelOne full cycle, picking wheel tickers, capital requirements, and what to do when it assigns you at a loss.
• VolatilityImplied versus realized, IV rank against IV percentile, skew, term structure, and the crush after earnings.
• The GreeksDelta three ways, gamma near expiry, the theta curve, vega, and why every sign flips when you are short.
• Assignment and expirationWhat happens on assignment day, early assignment, pin risk, and the expiration Friday checklist.
• Screening and probabilityProbability of profit against probability of touch, liquidity screening, and the real cost of a wide spread.
• Risk, taxes and trackingPosition sizing, concentration, wash sales, cost basis after assignment, and building an income ledger.
• Options basicsContracts, calls against puts from the seller side, reading a chain, and intrinsic against extrinsic value.

How these are written

• Worked examples with real arithmetic. Every number is shown, not asserted. Prices are illustrative and stamped as such, because a tutorial quoting live prices would be stale by the time you read it.
• Primary sources, linked. Exercise thresholds come from the OCC, tax rules from IRS publications, index returns from the published index data. Each carries the date it was checked.
• The unflattering parts stay in. The ten-year record of covered calls against buy and hold is roughly half the return. That is on the page.
• No scoring internals. These pages explain textbook options mechanics, which are public. How the OptionsKing confidence score is computed is not, and never appears here.

The tools that go with them

Every article links to the calculator that does its arithmetic. All twelve are free, run in your browser, need no account and store nothing you type.