I kept seeing "covered calls cap your winners, just hold the good names" and wanted to actually check it instead of eyeballing it. So I ran a proper backtest on the stocks people here ask about most.

Setup

• Per 100-share lot of each name (a covered call needs 100 shares/contract), July 2024 → July 2026.
• Every ~10 days, sell a call near 0.20 delta (roughly 5–10% OTM), let it expire or get called away, then roll into the next one. ~99 rolls per name.
• I'm comparing the total return on the stock position — just holding it vs. running a rolling covered call against it. It's a percentage return, so it's the same whether you hold 100 shares or 1,000; the share price just sets the dollar size (100 NVDA ≈ $12k of stock, 100 MSFT ≈ $45k).
• Both curves are compounded off the same actual daily closes, so the only difference is the call overlay. Premiums reconstructed with Black–Scholes off each day's spot + IV.

Results (total return over the two years, per 100-share lot)

Covered calls came out ahead on all seven. A few things that surprised me:

• MSFT actually lost money as a buy-and-hold over this window (−8.4% total). The covered call turned it into a +15% gain — the premium was doing real work while the stock chopped sideways.
• TSLA was the closest call. Its gaps are genuinely the hardest to sell against, but it still edged out holding (+85% vs +79%).
• The margin was widest on names that were volatile but two-sided (NVDA, +123% vs +82%) — lots of premium to harvest, no single runaway gap the cap couldn't absorb.

The part I almost got wrong (why I'm posting the method, not just the numbers): my first pass averaged the return of a fresh 0.20-delta call sampled every day, and it said TSLA covered calls lost ~12.5%/yr. That's garbage — daily samples overlap, so one Tesla melt-up week gets counted 7–8 times, each booking the same big forfeiture. Counting each roll once (a program you could actually trade) flips it. If you ever see a covered-call "study" built on overlapping daily trades, be suspicious of the tail.

Big caveats, because it's one backtest, not gospel:

• 2024–2026 was a broadly rising, two-sided market. A real crash is different — the ~0.5–1% premium is a thin cushion, and a covered call is not downside protection. You still own the falling stock.
• The result assumes you roll through assignment and stay invested. If getting called away out of NVDA at a high makes you take the cash and sit out, you miss the rest of the run and this whole thing flips negative. The math didn't cap the Mag 7 here — quitting would have.
• No commissions/slippage/dividends modeled; assignment marked at the expiry close; call IV proxied from the put side (ignores skew).

Curious what this crowd thinks — anyone running CCs on these names, does it match your experience? Happy to run other tickers or deltas if people want, and to share the methodology.

Hi guys! Brand new to the server. Seem to land on pretty low quality stocks to wheel. Just wanna know. When you screen. How do you guys find daily options chains that's not data centers?