Updated September 2026
A covered call needs 100 shares per contract of the specific ticker you're selling calls against, held in that same account. Unlike a cash-secured put, there's no strike-price arithmetic for the "cover" requirement itself — it's a fixed multiple of contracts. The harder part in practice is tracking whether you actually hold enough shares of the right ticker in the right account, especially once you're running covered calls on more than one stock, in more than one place.
Sell 2 covered call contracts on AAPL and you need 200 shares of AAPL in that account — 200 shares of a different stock don't help, and 200 AAPL shares sitting in a different account don't help either, since each brokerage account is its own pool. This tracker keeps a running shares-held figure per ticker, per account tag, and flags any call position as "naked" the moment the shares on hand fall short — separate from the cash math used for puts, since shares and dollars aren't interchangeable.
You hold 300 shares of a stock in one account and sell 2 covered call contracts (200 shares' worth) plus, later, 1 more (100 shares' worth) — 3 contracts total, needing 300 shares. As long as you haven't sold or transferred any shares out, you're exactly covered. Sell a 4th contract without adding shares and the tracker flags that account 100 shares short — a naked call, whether or not you meant it to be.
The premium you collect when you sell the call is entered once, at trade time. From there, the tracker's P/L column uses a real, live option price — fetched from a public delayed options-chain feed (about 15 minutes behind the market) — to show what it would cost to buy that same call back right now. P/L = premium collected minus that buy-back cost. If a live quote isn't available for a specific contract, the figure falls back to an intrinsic-value estimate (clearly marked "~" and "est") rather than showing nothing. Full mechanics are on the How We Calculate page.
For a short call, the stock price is above the strike when it's in the money — meaning assignment risk, the shares could get called away at the strike. The tracker colors the price cell accordingly (red for ITM, green for OTM) with the percentage distance from strike shown alongside, so it's visible at a glance across every position without opening each ticker individually.
Static return is premium ÷ (strike × 100 × contracts) — a rough proxy for return relative to the value at risk if called away. Add an optional entry date and the tracker annualizes that return using your actual holding period (entry to expiration), rather than assuming every trade runs a full year. Leave the entry date blank and the annualized figure is simply left off instead of guessing. See annualized yield, explained in depth.
Every open position shows DTE (days to expiration) computed from today to the option's expiration date, with a highlighted pill once a position is inside 7 days — useful for spotting which covered calls need a decision (roll, let assign, or close) soonest, across every account at once rather than checking each broker separately.
Do I need to own the shares before adding a covered call position? The tracker doesn't require it at entry, but it will flag the position as under-covered ("naked") in the coverage view until you record enough held shares for that ticker and account.
What happens if my call is assigned and my shares get called away? Update your held-shares count for that ticker/account and move the position to your records — the tracker doesn't detect assignment automatically since that only happens at your broker.
Is this the same as the cash-secured put calculator? No — puts require cash (strike × 100 × contracts), calls require shares (100 × contracts) of that exact ticker. See the cash-secured put calculator for the put side.
Can I run covered calls on more than one account at once? Yes — an account tag is any broker × account combination, so shares-required tracking for the same ticker held in two different accounts stays separate rather than getting combined into one misleading total.