Own ABNB Stock? Here Is How To Collect 14% A Year On It

Here is a way to get paid a meaningful income now on your Airbnb shares, cash you keep no matter what, in exchange for agreeing to sell at a price above today’s if the stock keeps climbing.

Airbnb (ABNB) is trading right at its 52-week high, rewarding shareholders who have held on through its recent run. That leaves you with a classic high-class problem: do you let it ride, or do you find a way to turn some of that paper gain into actual cash? There is a strategy that does the latter, paying you an immediate income for simply agreeing to sell your shares at a profit later on, if it comes to that.

14% annualized income on ABNB shares you already own, with 8.6% of upside room, by selling a covered call.

• You own (or buy) 100 shares of ABNB near today’s price of $147.31.
• Sell one call option on ABNB expiring 6/17/2027, with a strike price of $160, about 8.6% above today.
• Collect roughly $1,983 in premiums up front per contract (each contract covers 100 shares), which you keep no matter what the stock does.
• That premium is about 14.0% annualized on the $14,731 of stock, income you earn just for holding.
• If ABNB finishes above $160, your shares are called away at $160. Counting the premium, your total return works out to about 23% annualized, but you give up any gains above the strike.

Either Way, The Premium Is Yours To Keep

If ABNB finishes below $160 on 6/17/2027, the call expires worthless, and you keep the full $1,983 premium and all your shares. That is about 13% over 351 days, income earned just for holding, and you are free to sell another call.

If ABNB finishes above $160, your 100 shares are called away at $160. You still keep the $1,983 premium, and counting it your total gain works out to about 22%, a healthy exit. The cost of the trade is that any gain above $160 is no longer yours. And if the stock instead falls, you keep the premium but still ride the shares down, cushioned only slightly.

So the whole trade comes down to one thing: how much of that upside are you really likely to give up, and would you be content to sell at that higher price?

Before You Sell That Call, Know What You Are Capping

The trade’s only real cost is the opportunity you might miss if the stock launches into orbit well past your exit price. So, how much blue sky are you really selling? The bull case is straightforward: the company just posted 18% revenue growth and raised its full-year outlook, now expecting growth to accelerate to the “low to mid-teens.” New ventures, like a push into hotels, are seeing their own metrics growing at more than “double that of the entire business,” suggesting new engines are firing up.

On the other hand, that momentum isn’t a straight line. Management itself guided for growth in its core metric, Nights and Seats Booked, to “decelerate slightly” in the second quarter from the 9% pace seen in Q1. That push into hotels is also a march into a fiercely competitive arena, and it remains to be seen if Airbnb can carve out a dominant position. For investors who like the travel theme but not the single-stock risk, a consumer discretionary ETF like XLY offers broader exposure. The trade, then, is a bet that the immediate income is worth more than the potential for a continued, unblemished surge. The key thing to watch is whether those new initiatives can re-accelerate core booking volumes after the expected Q2 slowdown.

Turn A Stock You Own Into Income

You may not own ABNB, but you almost certainly own something that could be paying you. Our Covered Call Finder lets you type in a stock, or a few, and instantly see the income a covered call could generate on each, then dial the strike up or down with a slider to balance more income against more upside. It is the quickest way to see what the names in your own portfolio could pay.

Income From One Name, Stability From Many

Getting paid to cap the upside on a stock you own is a smart way to squeeze income from it. But a single covered call, and even a single-theme fund, still rides one slice of the market. What steadies a portfolio is breadth across sectors, where a rough stretch for one industry is offset by a good one elsewhere.

The Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio provides that breadth: roughly 30 quality, cash-generative companies spanning sectors, judged on the full picture of their fundamentals rather than one options setup, and rebalanced as conditions change. It carries a track record of outpacing a benchmark that combines all major indices – the S&P 500, S&P Mid-cap, and Russell 2000. Keep collecting premium on individual names, with a cross-sector core doing the heavy lifting.