Historical performances of the Covered Call strategy
During the period 1987- 2009, a strategy of buying the S&P500 index while at the same time selling 1 month-ATM call on it, tracked by BXM (BXMX), outperformed the market by 70 basis points a year. This while only having two-thirds of the market's volatility. You can see the results for yourself in the following graph, the covered-call strategy is in orange:
Image source: Russell Investments Research
However, since 2010, the strategy has underperformed the market. And quite drastically (covered call is in orange, SPY in