I never said it was risk free or easy, and hedge funds do sell covered calls. The point is there is a well known and understood asymmetry between the long and s

I never said it was risk free or easy, and hedge funds do sell covered calls. The point is there is a well known and understood asymmetry between the long and short options markets due to the capital needed to write options. Intuitively the reason there is alpha for selling options is likely at least in part that you are letting people with little capital access leverage.