What I Do With a Bullish Stock (Hint: It’s Not Buy a Call)

June 27, 2025

Hey Traders,
On Wednesday, I walked you through one of my favorite trading tricks:

Find stocks that are already trending stronger than the market — and let the rising tide do the rest.

I also gave you a few names that popped up on my scanner recently as being extremely bullish — DRI, RBLX, and GDX.

All those tickers showing clean, strong trends in the same direction as the broader market.

Today, I want to show you what I do with names like that.

Step 1: I Don’t Buy Calls

Let’s start with what I don’t do.

I don’t chase the move.
I don’t try to time a breakout.
And I definitely don’t gamble on short-term calls.

Why? Because that’s a guessing game.
You’ve got to be right on the stock… right on the timing… and right on the size of the move. That’s a tough hand to play.

Step 2: I Sell Premium Instead

When I see a strong, trending stock, I look to sell options instead of buying them.

That means:

Sell a put spread if I think the stock stays above support.
Sell a naked put if I’d be happy owning shares.
Sell a covered call if I already own the stock and want to generate income.

The key to these three different ways of trading?

No matter which one I use, I collect cash up front… right at the moment I place the trade.

Besides that, I don’t need my idea about where the stock is going to be perfect in order to end up with a win.

Four More Trending Tickers

I’m feeling generous this week, so I’m going to give you four more tickers that are perfectly suited to using one of these strategies on.

PM
SHLD
OR
NFLX

What Do You See?

But I don’t want to just give you tickers and have you run with them, so let’s do a quick exercise. Here are those four tickers on a 6 month chart with daily candles.

What do you see?

I mean besides stocks that are clearly going up and to the right?

Maybe it would help if I put a chart of the SPY up, too:

By the way, those are the same 6 months — late December 2024 through today — on all those charts.

Hopefully it jumping out at you right now:

All the four tickers above have been way stronger than the SPY, the broad market index over the past 6 months.

See that huge dip in the middle of the SPY chart?

Sure, SPY might have just hit new all time highs in the past few days, but look at that huge round trip it took over the past 6 months.

All the way from about 600 down to 480 and back again to reclaim new highs.

Meanwhile look at the four charts above it.

With the exception of Netflix which came down to touch its 200 day moving average, before resuming a strong bullish trend…

All the tickers have been trending bullish for the majority of the past 6 months.

What else do you see?

bullish stack – For the most part, all four tickers have had their trendlines have been stacked in a bullish way over the past 6 months: 20 day green trendline on the bottom, 50 day blue trendline in the middle, 200 day red trendline on the bottom
bouncing off support – For the most part, they’ve been bouncing gently off their 20
significant growth – SPY may have just hit a new all time high, but it’s just barely higher than it was back in February. Meanwhile the four tickers above are anywhere between 37 and 55% higher than they started at.

But probably most importantly: Even those four bullish tickers had down periods in their larger bullish trend.

That’s why we don’t generally buy options around here — nothing goes up in a straight line.

Between time decay and the rhythm of the market, the higher probability trade is just latching onto a trending stock, giving yourself some cushion with an income based strategy and selling that premium.