Hedging Performance of Protective Puts and Covered Calls Portfolio: A Study of NSE Nifty Options

This paper aims at analyzing the return and risk characteristics of covered call and protective puts portfolios based on NSE Nifty index and to find out the factors responsible for the variation in returns on covered call and protective put portfolios. The factors which have been considered as the main determinants of returns on covered call and protective put portfolios are: the return on unhedged portfolio based on NSE nifty; the extent to which option is in the money or out of the money; time to maturity of the option; number of contracts traded; and Open Interest. The results indicate that the performance of covered call and protective put portfolios is better than the performance of unhedged portfolio both in terms of risk and returns. When the performance of covered call portfolio is compared with the performance of protective put portfolio, the results indicate that covered call portfolio provides higher average returns than protective put portfolio but both the total risk as well as market risk of protective put portfolio is lower than that of covered call portfolio. The results of estimated regression models indicate that covered call portfolio provides higher rate of return if call option included in covered call portfolio: is written with higher exercise price; has shorter time to maturity; enjoys high degree of liquidity; and has less number of outstanding contracts. The protective put portfolio provides higher returns if put option included in protective put portfolio: is written with lower exercise price; has longer time to maturity; has low degree of-liquidity; and has large number of outstanding contracts.