When I first started with equities and deriviatives, I wrote this website to help me find good covered call picks. My program scans over the day's option prices to find high volume stocks with call options being written on them, then I rank them by the option premium, divided by the price, to find the highest paying premium rate. That's the way I rank them on my website still.

But of course, the highest paying covered call contract probably has too much risk, that's why it pays so well; you get paid to suffer that risk.

I used to have a filter to remove the very low quality stocks from my list, but some people are willing to accept more risk than others, depending on market conditions. Just remember to do your research before buying a stock. I use different rated stocks, depending on the particular market sentiment at the time, buying lower quality stocks when the market is booming and sticking more to the better stocks when I feel a downturn is near.

Next I looked into how the projected return differs, depending on the length of the contract. Is it better to make 3% in a month or 14% in nine months? To help compare different covered call positions, I added the Projected Return column which gives you the approximate APR (Annual Percentage Rate) if the stock is called away or if it stays flat and is not called away. This page also shows the price of the stock minus the call premium, in dollars and percent, so you can see how much downside protection you would have if you bought this stock and sold the call.

Each call listed also has links to other websites for you to do more research, both checking the financials, along with current prices and rating.

I'm not an expert at this - I don't use puts, I rarely buy back a call once I sell it. I subscribe to the KISS principle. I don't have enough capital to afford the commision on those more exotic positions anyway, so I keep away from them. In the few years I've been buying stock and selling covered calls I've made money, both in good markets and bad (although I make more money in good markets!).

My website using end of day data is free, except for some advertising banners. I don't run intrusive advertising or popups; I don't like them and I figure you won't either. If you like my website, you can help by telling others about it so I feed more banners. If you don't like my website, tell me!

brew@theMode.com,