How can I figure out when I'll be able to write call options of a stock?
Call the CBOE, the Chicago Board of Options Exchange I've requested options on several IPOs in the past. You mainly have to convince them that there is a market for them (or they won't be inclined to provide liquidity). The CBOE could talk to the company in question to help convince them, or the CBOE will just tell you when the options will begin trading. Oh yeah, sometimes they'll ask you who you work for, just try to avoid that question, they don't like to talk to individual/retail investors. You can't know. It's not like every stock has options traded on it, so until you either see the options listed or a company announcement that option will trade on a certain date, there's no way to be sure.
Option contracts typically each represent 100 shares. So the 1 call contract you sold to open (wrote) grants the buyer of that option the right to purchase your 100 shares for $80.00 per share any time before the option expiration date. You were paid a gross amount of $100 (100 shares times $1.00 premium per share) for taking on the obligation to deliver should the option holder choose to exercise. You received credit in your account of $89.22, which ought to be the $100 less any trading commission (~$10?) and miscellaneous fees (regulatory, exchange, etc.) per contract. You did capture premium. However, your covered call write represents an open short position that, until either (a) the option expires worthless, or (b) is exercised, or (c) is bought back to close the position, will continue to show on your account as a liability. Until the open position is somehow closed, the value of both the short option contract and long stock will continue to fluctuate. This is normal. Put options are contracts to sell. You pay me a fee for the right to put the stock (or other underlying security) in my hands if you want to. That happens on a specific date (the strike date) and a specified price (the strike price). You can decide not to exercise that right, but I must follow through and let you sell it to me if you want to. Put options can be used by the purchaser to cap losses. For example: You purchase a PUT option for GE Oct19 13.00 from me. On October 19th, you can make me let you sell your GE stock to me for $13.00 a share. If the price for GE has fallen to $12.00, that would be a good idea. If its now at $15.00 a share, you will probably keep the GE or sell it at the current market price. Call options are contracts to buy. The same idea only in the other direction: You pay me a fee for the right to call the stock away from me. Calls also have a strike date and strike price. Like a put, you can choose not to exercises it. You can choose to buy the stock from me (on the strike date for the strike price), but I have to let you buy it from me if you want to.  For example: You purchase a CALL option for GE Oct19 16.00 option from me. On October 19th, you can buy my GE stock from me for $16.00 a share. If the current price is $17.50, you should make me let you buy if from me for $16.00. If its less than $16.00, you could by it at the current market price for less. Commonly, options are for a block of 100 shares of the underlying security. Note: this is a general description. Options can be very complicated. The fee you pay for the option and the transaction fees associated with the shares affects whether or not exercising is financially beneficial. Options can be VERY RISKY. You can loose all your money as there is no innate value in the option, only how it relates to the underlying security. Before your brokerage will let you trade, there are disclosures you must read and affirm that you understand the risk. "There are a number of strategies using options and shares together.  One that sells large potential upside gains to assure more consistent medium returns is to ""write covered calls"".  This fairly conservative and is a reasonable entry point into options for an individual investor. Deeper dive into covered calls" "There are three ways to do this. So far the answers posted have only mentioned two.  The three ways are: Selling short means that you borrow stock from your broker and sell it with the intent of buying it back later to repay the loan.  As others have noted, this has unlimited potential losses and limited potential gains.  Your profit or loss will go $1:$1 with the movement of the price of the stock. Buying a put option gives you the right to sell the stock at a later date on a price that you choose now.  You pay a premium to have this right, and if the stock moves against you, you won't exercise your option and will lose the premium.  Options move non-linearly with the price of the stock, especially when the expiration is far in the future.  They probably are not for a beginner, although they can be powerful if used properly. The third option is a synthetic short position.  You form this by simultaneously buying a put option and selling short a call option, both at the same strike price.  This has a risk profile that is very much like the selling the stock short, but you can accomplish it entirely with stock options.  Because you're both buying an selling, in theory you might even collect a small net premium when you open. You might ask why you'd do this given that you could just sell the stock short, which certainly seems simpler.  One reason is that it is not always possible to sell the stock short.  Recall that you have to borrow shares from your broker to sell short.  When many people want to short the stock, brokers will run out of shares to loan.  The stock is then said to be ""hard to borrow,"" which effectively prevents further short selling of the stock.  In this case the synthetic short is still potentially possible." Since it's not a public company it would be difficult for anyone to value these options or predict their future value without a lot more details on the finances of the firm.  Once the firm goes public you can use the Black Shoales equation to get a present value for the options.  And once they've got several months of trading data you can get a very rough estimate the future stock price with it's beta.  But with individual stocks predicting future values can really be a crapshoot. Let's say a stock trades at $100 right now, and you can buy a $100 call option. When you buy the call option (and the money you paid is gone), one of two things can happen: The share price goes up, or the share price goes down.  If the share price goes up, you profit. If the share price goes down, you don't lose! Because once the shares are below $100, you don't exercise the call option, and you don't lose any money.  So if you have a share that is rock solid at $100, you don't make money. If you have a share where the company owner took some ridiculous risk, and the shares could go to $200 or the company could go bankrupt, then you have a 50% chance to make $100 and a 50% chance to not lose anything. That's much more preferable. Options, both puts and calls, are typically written/sold at different strike prices. For example, even though the stock of XYZ is currently trading at $12.50, there could be put options for prices ranging from $0.50 to $30.00, just as an example. There are several factors that go into determining the strike prices at which people are willing to write options. The writer/seller of an option is the person on the other side of the trade that has the opposite opinion of you. If you are interested in purchasing a put on a stock to hedge your downside, that means the writer/seller of the put is betting that you are wrong and that the stock price will rise instead. Specific stock advice isn't permitted on these boards. I'm discussing the process of a call spread with the Apple Jan 13 calls as an example.  In effect, you have $10 to 'bet.' Each bet you'd construct offers a different return (odds). For example, If you bought the $750 call at $37.25, you'd need to look to find what strike has a bid of $27 or higher. The $790 is bid $27.75. So this particular spread is a 4 to 1 bet the stock will close in January over $790, with a $760 break even.  You can pull the number from Yahoo to a spreadsheet to make your own chart of spread costs, but I'll give one more example.  You think it will go over $850, and that strike is now ask $18.85. The highest strike currently listed is $930, and it's bid $10.35. So this spread cost is $850, and a close over $930 returns $8000 or over 9 to 1.  Again, this is not advice, just an analysis of how spreads work. Note, any anomalies in the pricing above is the effect of a particular strike having no trades today, not every strike is active so 'last trade' can be days old.   Note: My answer adds to AlexR's response in that once you used the word bet and showed a desire to make a risky move, options are the answer. You acknowledged you understand the basic concept, but given the contract size of 100 shares, these suggestions are ways to bet under your $1000 limit and profit from the gain in the underlying stock you hope to see. I don't think you understand options. If it expires, you can't write a new call for the same expiration date as it expired that day. Also what if the stock price decreases further to $40 or even more? If you think the stock will move in either way greatly, and you wish to be profit from it, look into straddles. If you are worried about elections think about writing some calls against your long positions to help hedge.   If you have MSFT (@ $51.38 right now) you could write a MSFT Call for lets say $55. You can bank $170 per 100 shares (let's say you write it at 1.70) (MSFT 01/20/2017 55.00 C 1.73 +0.01 Bid: 1.69 Ask: 1.77) If MSFT goes down a lot you will have lost $170 less per 100 shares than you would have because you wrote an option for $170.  You will in fact be break even if the stock falls to 49.68 on the Jan Strike Date. If MSFT goes up $3.50 you will have made $170 and still have your MSFT stock for a net gain of $520.  $170 in cash for the premium and your stock is now worth $350 more. If MSFT goes up $3.62 or more you will have made the max $530ish and have no MSFT left potentially losing additional profit if the stock goes up like gang busters.   So is it worth it for you to get $170 in cash now and risk the stock going up more than $5 between now and Jan.  That is the decision to make here. No, if your stock is called away, the stock is sold at the agreed upon price. You cannot get it back at your original price. If you don't want your stock to be called, make sure you have the short call position closed by expiration if it is ITM.  Also you could be at risk for early assignment if the option has little to no extrinsic value, although probably not. But when dividends are coming, make sure you close your short ITM options. If the dividend is worth more than the extrinsic value, you are pretty much guaranteed to be assigned. Been assigned that way too many times. Especially in ETFs where the dividends aren't dates are not always easy to find. It happens typically during triple witching. If you are assigned on your short option, you will be short stock and you will have to pay the dividend to the shareholder of your short stock. So if you have a covered call on, and you are assigned, your stock will be called away, and you will have to pay the dividend. "Covered calls, that is where the writer owns the underlying security, aren't the only type of calls one can write. Writing ""uncovered calls,"" wherein one does NOT own the underlying, are a way to profit from a price drop. For example, write the call for a $5 premium, then when the underlying price drops, buy it back for $4, and pocket the $1 profit." A long put - you have a small initial cost (the option premium) but profit as the stock goes down. You have no additional risk if the shock rises, even a lot. Short a stock - you gain if the stock drops, but have unlimited risk if it rises, the call mitigates this, by capping that rising stock risk. The profit/loss graph looks similar to the long put when you hold both the short position and the long call.  You might consider producing a graph or spreadsheet to compare positions. You can easily sketch put, call, long stock, short stock, and study how combinations of positions can synthetically look like other positions. Often, when a stock has no shares to short, the synthetic short can help you put your stock position in place. "I think the issue you are having is that the option value is not a ""flow"" but rather a liability that changes value over time. It is best to illustrate with a balance sheet. The $33 dollars would be the premium net of expense that you would receive from your brokerage for having shorted the options. This would be your asset. The liability is the right for the option owner (the person you sold it to) to exercise and purchase stock at a fixed price. At the moment you sold it, the ""Marked To Market"" (MTM) value of that option is $40. Hence you are at a net account value of $33-$40= $-7 which is the commission. Over time, as the price of that option changes the value of your account is simply $33 - 2*(option price)*(100) since each option contract is for 100 shares. In your example above, this implies that the option price is 20 cents. So if I were to redo the chart it would look like this If the next day the option value goes to 21 cents, your liability would now be 2*(0.21)*(100) = $42 dollars. In a sense, 2 dollars have been ""debited"" from your account to cover your potential liability. Since you also own the stock there will be a credit from that line item (not shown). At the expiry of your option, since you are selling covered calls, if you were to be exercised on, the loss on the option and the gain on the shares you own will net off. The final cost basis of the shares you sold will be adjusted by the premium you've received. You will simply be selling your shares at strike + premium per share (0.20 cents in this example)" I understand the question, I think. The tough thing is that trades over the next brief time are random, or appear so. So, just as when a stock is $10.00 bid / $10.05 ask, if you place an order below the ask, a tick down in price may get you a fill, or if the next trades are flat to higher, you might see the close at $10.50, and no fill as it never went down to your limit.  This process is no different for options than for stocks.  When I want to trade options, I make sure the strike has decent volume, and enter a market order. Edit - I reworded a bit to clarify. The Black–Scholes is a model, not a rigid equation. Say I discover an option that's underpriced, but it trades under right until it expires. It's not like there's a reversion to the mean that will occur. There are some very sophisticated traders who use these tools to trade in some very high volumes, for them, it may produce results. For the small trader you need to know why you want to buy a stock or its option and not worry about the last $0.25 of its price.