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Pros & Cons of Leveraged ETFs When Selling Stock Options – October 20, 2025
Retail investors may become enticed to use leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs) when writing covered calls or selling cash-secured puts. The reason is that the option returns are generally so much greater...
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Calculating Multiple Call & Put Trades with the Same Stock in 2 Expiration Cycles – October 13, 2025
Calculating our covered call writing and cash-secured put trades can range anywhere from really simple to way too complicated. In this article, an example of the latter will be...
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Comparing Weekly, Monthly and Longer-Term Covered Call Expirations Using the Same Strike Price – October 6, 2025
A common misconception made by many retail investors is that they make more money selling longer-dated options because the dollar amount is so much greater than shorter-dated choices. This...
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A Defensive 4-Day Cash-Secured Put Trade Start-to-Finish – September 29, 2025
Cash-secured put trades can be crafted conservatively by using deep out-of-the-money (OTM) strikes. On 5/27/2025, I executed such a 4-day trade with NetEase Inc. (Nasdaq: NTES), a stock on our premium...
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Using Both ITM & OTM Covered Calls to Align with Current Market Conditions – September 22, 2025
When establishing our covered call portfolios (cash-secured puts, too), our strike selection is influenced by current market conditions. In normal-to-bull markets, we favor out-of-the-money (OTM) strikes which allow for...
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Rolling-Up a Weekly Defensive Cash-Secured Put Trade – September 15, 2025
Sep 13, 2025 | Investment Basics, Option Trading Basics, Options Calculations, Options Trade Execution, Put-selling, Stock Option Strategies When a cash-secured put is sold, we agree to buy the shares at the strike price by the expiration date....
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What is Quantifying Risk: Part II- Using Implied Volatility (IV) – September 8, 2025
In a recent article titled What is Quantifying Risk: Part I- Using Delta, one methodology of measuring the risk of our covered call writing and cash-secured put trades was analyzed. In...
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What is Quantifying Risk: Part I- Using Delta – September 2, 2025
When analyzing the risk of our covered call writing or cash-secured put trades, we typically are referring to the exposure of losing capital. However, there is also the risk of exercise,...
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Can We Generate Significant Returns with a Defensive 4-Day Cash-Secured Put Trade? – August 25, 2025
In bear and volatile markets, our cash-secured put trades (covered calls too) should be structured in a defensive manner. Greater protection to the downside typically means lower returns. That’s the tradeoff....
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Using the Zero-Dollar Collar to Protect Greatly Appreciated Shares – August 18, 2025
We can use put options as a hedge against share price decline of our long stock positions. This may be particularly useful after exponential price acceleration, and we want...
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