The ten companies that
move the index.
Roughly 38% of the S&P 500 sits in these ten names. If you own an index fund, you own this list — so it is worth understanding what each business actually earns, what would break it, and how its volatility behaves if you ever write options against it.
What the rating means — and what it does not
Covered-call character grades the option trade, never the company and never the stock. It asks one narrow question: does this name’s volatility structure pay you enough to justify capping your upside?
| Rating | Means |
|---|---|
| Well suited | Enough implied volatility to pay a real credit, a deep and liquid chain, and price behaviour that rarely gaps through a strike overnight. |
| Workable | The premium is there and the chain is liquid, but something — event risk, a growth thesis you'd be capping, a wide skew — needs a deliberate strike choice. |
| Handle with care | Rich premium for a reason. These names gap hard and trend hard, so the upside you surrender and the assignment tax can easily exceed the credit. |
| Poor fit | Implied volatility is too low to pay you meaningfully for the upside you'd cap. Nothing about the business — purely a statement about how little premium the chain offers. |
How these are written
Every analysis is in two halves. The first explains the business the way you would want it explained if you had never read a financial statement. The second is for readers who have — the variables that actually determine results, the mechanism behind the moat, and the specific things that would break it.
Then a third section that no ordinary stock write-up contains: how the name behaves in the options market. Where its implied volatility usually sits, how violently it moves on earnings, how deep the chain is, and the structural traps — share classes, splits, ex-dividend dates — that quietly turn a covered call into a different trade than you intended.
What you will not find here
- No prices, multiples, implied vols or yields. A page maintained by hand cannot keep those current, and a stale number presented as a live one is worse than no number at all. Live figures are one click away in the Screener and the Calculator, and every analysis links straight into them with the ticker filled in.
- No price targets, no buy/sell ratings, no forecasts. Nobody publishing a static page knows where a stock will trade, and pretending otherwise is the thing that makes most stock commentary useless.
- No claim of completeness. Ten companies at one point in time. Names just outside this list — large pharmaceutical and retail constituents in particular — matter too, and index membership changes.
Why the top ten specifically
Concentration. A small number of companies now account for a large share of the index, which means a broad-market fund is far less diversified than its name suggests. Two consequences follow, and both are practical. Your index exposure and your individual holdings probably overlap much more than you think. And if you write covered calls on one of these names while also holding an index fund, you are capping upside you own twice.
The lessons behind the analysis — why a high win rate can still lose money, what a covered call really costs, and why every figure here is shown after tax — are in the Learn library.
Read the analysis, then check today’s numbers
The Screener applies every gate in the Learn library to a live options chain and tells you which one stopped a trade when nothing passes.
Open the ScreenerEducational information only — not investment, tax, or legal advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Nest Money is not a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer. Company descriptions are our own summary of publicly available information as at the date shown and may be incomplete or out of date; verify anything you intend to act on against the company’s own filings. Options involve substantial risk of loss, including loss greater than the premium collected.