If you sell a Covered Call, can you immediately withdraw from your account, the premium received from selling the options? Or you have to wait until the option expires (or gets assigned)?
You can take the money out of your account assuming you are not on full margin. The call is protected by the stock for upside issues of the stock rising. However, one you take out the premium, you no longer are protected against downside risk. For example, say you sold an out of the money call for 2 points of premium, and then you took out $ 190, ie $ 10 for cost of transaction. Stock then falls 2 points, you are now negative $ 200 in your account.
You must maintain the margin requirement in your account. If there's excess cash, it's yours for the taking. For example, stock is 50 and call is 2. In a covered call, there is no margin requirement on the short call. It's 50% on the stock. Your margin requirement is $2,500 and since the premium can be applied to you margin requirement, your margin call (SMA debit) is $2,300. If you do this 50 strike CC in a 5 grand cash account, you could take out the $200. Or you could simply start out with $4800 (the total risk involved). Margin is a nother story. You could withdraw a lot more than the $200 out of the 5 grand account or put up a lot less to initiate the position ($2,300 to cover the SMA margin debit). But if the stock dropped a lot, you would have margin call since equity loss comes out of your side of the equation