Quote from mc_s:
Writing naked puts is not as dangerous as writing naked calls, like I said, as long as you have sufficient funds for the purchase of the stock you are promising to buy should the price of the stock drop and you get exercised!
Get over the "unlimited" loss concept of short stock. Nothing goes to infinity and if you know what you're doing, losses are cut regartdless of whether you're long or short.
Never sell more calls than stocks that you own!! If you own 1000 shares never sell more than 10 contracts!!! Right? each contract being for 100 shares. because you have the 1000 shares already, you don't have to go to the open market in order to get the shares to sell (which may have gone way up in price, right?)
...selling a call is a promise to sell a stock for a certain price, what business do any of us have making this promise if we don't already own the shares we are promising to sell. If someone takes us up on our promise (exersises us) where we gonna get the shares?? The market right? what happens if the price of the stock has taken off since we made our promise, we could possibly have to go to the market and spend $12.00 dollars per share in order to turn around and be obligated to sell them to our option purchaser for your agreed upon price (the strike of the call that you sold) which could be say for example $8.00/share or worse, you just don't know what could happen after you sell the call, anything could happen right? That's why you should never sell naked calls.
So it's OK to take the risk of a stock going to zero but overwriting could be disasterous? LOL. Great R/R spectrum. You do what you're capable of understanding, tolerating and managing.