i love this app, if you have enough free time to learn you can graduate from retail investor to real live money maker!

2021 was my first full year in the stock market - what a crash course on volatility! I first learned about covered calls investing in Virgin Galactic stock, I’m sure anyone that’s taken that ride with me has their own own lesson they could tell. I was still learning about options, could barely remember the difference between a call and a put when I stumbled across the price of long term call options for SPCE. At the time the stock was trading around $18 and people were paying like $1400 for $15 calls expiring January 2023. it didn’t take me long to realize I could buy 100 shares in a margin account for $900 cash, the other half on margin of course, then sell the call for $1400, from my perspective I was being paid $500 to buy 100 shares- plus ”free” stock! I bought 200 shares and used the leverage to shop for other similar deals - CPE, Palantir, Fuelcell, Nio and quite a few other similar deals allowed me to grow my portfolio from over a hundred fractions of expensive stocks to a couple thousand shares of stocks under $40 and at one point my stock portfolio went from barely enough money to have a margin account to over $80,000 worth of stocks. While stock prices soared I couldn’t afford to sell shares because of the corresponding call prices holding them hostage. I’m many cases I wish I had cashed out before volatility stomped prices lower than what I paid for them, many others I did cash out and later wished I hadn’t. While there was some tough lessons learned about overly aggressive investments, in general even if I lost money on the stock I still won on the option. just because some deals appear too good to be true doesn’t mean they’re not good deals. Stocks bought on margin should never be looked at as free, you will eventually end up paying, but if the market is betting rediculous amounts of money on stocks going up and you buy into them using covered calls as leverage, even if they’re wrong, and in many cases they are, there truely are some deals that while they didn’t make me rich like the young investor in me was hoping, I didn’t lose the kind of money investors not protected by selling call options did, and in pretty much every case I still had a net gain even on the biggest losers, ie Virgin Galactic. if I had to do 2021 over I would do so many things differently, and while these days I shop mainly for companies that are earning profits and paying dividends in times of high volatility, I can’t think of any covered calls I have huge regrets about. if you’re new to stocks and especially if you’re new to options I highly recommend playing with some covered calls, it’s a great way to protect yourself from volatility, find stocks that are undervalued, and experiment with the pros and cons of buying 100 shares of a stock you can afford vs only one or two shares of a Google or an Amazon or any other stock that might be a great investment for people with six figure or higher brokerage accounts but not necessarily for someone trying to grow something small into something large BEFORE they’re too old to work anymore.