Odds of successful call writing

Earlier today, I wrote a call option on my ACV stake. At the time, I was more concerned about getting paid to sell than loosing out on gains. This afternoon, I took a look the odds of exceeding my break-even price at the end of the two weeks. I calculated that if miss out on any increase of beyond 1.89%. First, I grabbed all the closing prices for ACV and loaded them into an SQLite database. Then I counted the total number of two week periods in my dataset:

sqlite> select count(*)
   ...> from (select * from acv_prices a
   ...>       join acv_prices b
   ...>            on (julianday(b.date) = julianday(a.date) - 14));

5503

Next I counted the number of those periods in which the closing price increased by 1.89% or more:

sqlite> select count(*)
   ...> from (select (a.close-b.close)/b.close increase
   ...>       from acv_prices a 
   ...>       join acv_prices b
   ...>            on (julianday(b.date) = julianday(a.date) - 14))
   ...> where increase > 0.0189;

2088

Therefore, if the past is any indication of the future, there is a 38% (2088/5503) chance my option will be called for a loss.

One of my goals in writing the option was that I would like to sell my Alberto-Culver shares. It's likely that a 1% increase will result in my option being assigned, so I also took a look at the number of fortnights in which the stock increased by that percentage or more. I won't show the code, but it turns out that 2551, or 46% of the periods resulted in greater than 1% increases. And just for kicks, I looked at the odds ACV will loose value over the fortnight, which is 43%.

Overall, the odds for each scenario shakes out like this:

ACV	Option	Odds
Down	Expire	43%
Up	Expire	11%
Up	Excerised for gain	8%
Up	Excerised for loss	38%
Total		100%