You're probably already aware that General Motors (GM) has reclaimed a spot on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), with the Detroit icon making its Big Board debut on Nov. 18. As of today, options are now available to trade on the bailed-out automaker, and speculators are already rushing to place their bets on GM.

Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS) has been a notable outperformer in 2010, with the shares adding more than 79% year-to-date. In fact, the gaming guru tagged a new annual high of $27.80 Monday, marking its best price since October 2008. However, judging by a major options trade that crossed the tape Monday morning, not everyone is expecting the equity's positive momentum to continue.

Shortly after the open, a block of 3,390 contracts changed hands on LVS' July 31 call, just below the bid price -- indicating they were most likely sold. Open interest at this newly front-month strike currently totals just 1,005 contracts, so it's safe to assume that these are newly opened short calls.

As I discussed in the first part of my options series, investors typically perceive options to be very risky and highly speculative. While this certainly true in many circumstances, that's not to say that it's impossible to use options of options to leverage an investment strategy.

While I focused on puts in my last options article, in this post I will focus on covered calls. Covered calls are the sale of call option contracts when you own the underlying stock, and therefore you are "covered." Unlike puts, where the option is exercised if the stock hits a predetermined price lower than the current price, calls are exercised if the stock hits a predetermined price higher than the current price.

Although covered calls have several different potential applications, in this post I'm going to focus primarily on one specific application -- generating income on a stock you would like to hold.

For many investors, constant buying and selling of stocks is unrealistic and undesirable. In fact, there is tremendous evidence to suggest that the more active an investor is the worse his returns are. As a result, many investors don't know what to do when a company they desire to hold reaches a price that they consider to be overvalued. Part of the investor believes over the long term the company's intrinsic value will continue to increase and he will regret selling now. But part of him wants to monetize the recent rally in the stock's price. In this situation, selling covered calls makes great sense.