To answer the original poster, yes I do write covered calls from my retirement account. I use them as a slightly better way to enter a sell limit order. Say I have a stock that I bought for $20/share that is now $200 per share and that is now too high a percentage of my portfolio. I want to sell half. There are three ways I could do this. I could simply enter a market sell order. This is the simplest way. But suppose that I am greedy, and think that the stock has a bit more to run. I could enter a limit sell order at, say, $220 for whatever number of shares that I want to sell. I could also sell a covered call that is fairly long dated, say a year at the same $220 strike price. If the price goes up to my target, my stock gets called away at an attractive price. If the stock does not get up to the strike price by the end of the option period, then I keep the stock (and any dividends) and the price of the option. Note: I would only do this if the price of the option was at least 5% of the value of the stock. I don't do this very often because it is seldom that I want to sell a highly appreciated stock, and even when I do, there is seldom an option priced attractively enough to be worth bothering with.
Joe