Return-on-investment

This is a good book if you already have a grasp of the basic concepts of covered call writing but are more interested in the details of why covered call writing works rather than how to use the concept to make money. The author spends a lot of time going through esoteric details on black scholes models and comparisons between the buy and hold and covered call strategy but little time is spent on providing real market examples on how to use the concepts in the book to make money. As an investor and trader my main purpose of reading any book is to learn the "how to" practical concepts that work in real market situations to enhance my profits and this is where this book is deficient. Furthermore this book does not get into the art of picking the right stocks and the timing criteria needed to decide when a covered call is a good strategy and when it is a losing one.
This book deserves at least 4 stars for explaining the covered call concept in great details and proving its usefulness. To make the best use of this book you need to couple it with one that will give more practical examples on using these concepts in real life situations in addition to strategies of picking the right stocks to write covered calls on and critical timing strategies. The book that worked best for me was the recently published September 2003 Second Edition "generate thousands on your stocks without selling them " By Elias. Elias's book has extensive real market examples with many innovative and profitable concepts.

I expected a bit more from these authors. There is a wealth of data (too much) showing the viability of this strategy. This book provides convincing evidence that covered call writing is an excellent strategy - a stratgy I discovered last year after reading THE SHORT BOOK ON OPTIONS, which I also recommend.

The short book goes deeper into the basics of options. Lehman's book is for the more advanced options student.

Read both books and adopt this investment strategy. You won't be sorry (based on my profitable first year of using options)

an excellent guide to understanding covered call writing. as a retiree and never having written covered calls, i am convinced it is an opportunity for conservative investors offering potential returns competitive with stock ownership alone and better returns than those available on bonds. mr.lehman covers all aspects, from underlying stock selection, selecting good covered writes, web sites offering all sorts of data and even tax consequences as structured by IRS.