How to sell a covered call on GOOGL

The position is two pieces: long 100 GOOGL shares and short one call. The short call obliges you to deliver those shares at $375 if the buyer exercises, and you keep the $580 premium no matter what happens. That's the whole trade — you sold the right tail of your own position.

At August 28, 2026 expiry there are three outcomes. Below $375 the call expires worthless and you keep both the shares and the premium. Above it the shares get called away at $375, for a total return of 6.9% from $356.13 including the premium. Exactly at the strike, you keep everything and a coin flip decides assignment.

Your breakeven on the combined position sits at $350.33 — spot minus the premium collected. That is the only downside protection a covered call gives you: 1.6% of cushion. It is not a hedge.

The other cost is opportunity. Above $375 your P/L is flat at $2,467 while the stock keeps going. On a name that gaps — earnings, cloud growth, and antitrust/regulatory headlines — that ceiling gets tested more often than the annualized-yield table suggests.

GOOGL goes ex-dividend on September 4, 2026. An ITM short call is a genuine early-assignment risk the day before: if the remaining extrinsic value is less than the dividend, a rational holder exercises to capture it and your shares disappear early. Check the ex-date before you sell a call that expires after it.

Liquidity is a risk, not a convenience. The moment you most want out of a short-premium position is the moment the spread is widest, and the exit price you modelled at mid will not be available.

Thin credits, and thin for the right reason: Alphabet realizes less vol than it implies less often than its peers, so the short-premium edge is genuinely smaller here. The newly-instituted dividend also reintroduces the early-assignment calculus on ITM short calls, which covered-call writers who learned the name pre-dividend routinely forget to re-check.

GOOGL's Aug 28 strikes are $5 apart near the money (1.40% of spot). On a ladder that wide, "pick the 0.30 delta strike" resolves to whichever rung happens to be closest — sometimes not close at all. 30k contracts of open interest on Aug 28 is workable around the money and thin in the wings — width costs more here than the ladder suggests. 28 strikes on that expiry — 45% of the board — carry prints that agree with their own implied volatility and hold up across the ladder, and those are the strikes priced here. Tight and deep; a fine strike ladder makes precise strike selection genuinely possible.

Skew is inverted: the 25-delta CALL implies 2.0% more vol than the put. That is the market pricing upside risk above downside risk — a squeeze, a takeover rumour, or a crowded short. Selling calls into an inverted skew pays better than usual and is riskier than usual for exactly the same reason. The term structure is flat inside 1.5% between the two captured expiries, so there is no calendar edge to harvest and no event visibly priced into one month over the other.

At 33% ATM implied vol, the Aug 28 options are pricing a one-standard-deviation move of $31.76 over 27 days — roughly −8.9% to +8.9%, or $324.37 to $387.89. A short-premium structure here is a bet that 8.9% over 27 days is more than GOOGL will actually use. That is the thesis, stated honestly.

The specific way people lose money on GOOGL: Writing calls at a delta borrowed from a higher-vol name. The same 0.30 delta buys far less premium here, and the assignment odds are identical.