I agree. I tried it a number of times in my sep account. Since I trade mainly energy stocks (although that probably is irrelevant), I finally figured out that, by writing calls, I either missed out on a big move, like buying BTU in Feb at $85ish and then sold the 6/90's for what I thought was a very healthy premium; of course, then BTU proceeded to split and run to over $70. By the time June came around, I had watched that run in the middle, and then got excercised at post-split $45; so, I missed the whole run, but made a decent profit, which, did not ease the pain any.
Same thing happened with VLO, but in the other direction. I busted my ass selling the calls, buying them back, reselling them, and in the end result I ended out getting stopped out at break even....when, if I had just played the stock, I would have had some control and made some money. I had about a dozen more examples of that this year.
Bottom line, I originally figured I could use call writing as a strategy in a retirement account to achieve gains of around 20% per annum, but I feel a lot more comfortable just buying and selling the stock whenever I feel like it, and not be locked in to a call position.
Anyway, that's my personal experience on that subject.
