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Selling a call alone doesn't work well with both protection from a downturn and deferring taxes. If you sell it ATM or OTM, it doesn't protect against a large downturn. If you sell it DITM, then you already realize most of the gains by selling the call (at least that's how it works with the IRS). You could do it with a collar though, just pretend your now-DITM call is a long stock position since its delta is probably close enough to 1. This way you can sell an (A/O)TM call and buy an (A/I)TM put, and realize only the small amount of gain right now in selling the (A/O)TM call, saving and locking in the rest of the gain for next year, regardless of where the stock price ends up. Before you do this, you might want to double check IRS rules on combo orders/multi-leg positions and make sure this is how they will treat the taxes. I'm pretty sure it works since most of their exceptions are to prevent tax "exploits" with straddle-like positions where you leg out of one of the legs (either the winning or losing) depending on whether you want to realize gains or losses this year and hold the other until next year, but you should double check to make sure. (Note that you don't have to sell the call and buy the put with the same strike. You can both sell an OTM call and buy an OTM put, leaving some wiggle room for some potential extra profit/loss if you like.)