Day trading with buy-writes?

A good friend once suggested that my propensity to do buy-writes was silly (he might have used a stronger word). Since covered calls are a bullish strategy, why not just go long, instead of messing around with options strategies that strongly limit the upside and only give a moderate amount of downside protection?

The reason I don't follow my friend's advice is that if I'm in a short term timeframe, and just long with a stock I turn into a day trader. And I don't have the time, temperment, or track record pursue day trading. With covered calls the pace slows down, and I make better decisions. My other rational is that markets go side-ways a lot more of the time than they go up or down. Getting time premium from being short options is a good deal--most of the time.

Upside opportunity vs downside risk in the market is one of the qualitative measures my brain generates. Right now I see quite a bit more upside than downside, and the market has been making big positive jumps. To try and take advantage of those jumps (without day trading, and with some downside protection) I did a buy-write of SPY with Aug 99 Calls for an overall debit of 96.79. SPY was at 98.86 and the calls were at 2.07. I immediately put a close out order in for a net credit of 92.28 -- a .49 gain. I choose this strike price because it was just a little out of the money. The amount of premium starts dropping off as soon as the underlying increases past the strike price--assuming the IV stays constant. After I put in the credit order SPY moved up to 99.46, a 0.60 move and the resultant available credit moved up .29, very close the .5 delta behavior you would expect from an ATM buy-write combination. A short term move of 1.2 or so in the underlying should trigger this credit order.