RE naked calls
You are right that this is strategy that needs close monitoring. I've done it in the past and it's been quite profitable for me (keep in mind that market only went up in those days so it was even riskier). But I don't think the risks are as high as you may think. This is how I do it.
I choose a stock with an up trend and very high implied volatility (say 80%). I buy the stock and sell an out of money covered call. If the stock drops, I have cushioned the blow due to call writing. If it moves up, so much the better. When I see a change in the character of the stock that would make me want to get out, I sell the stock and leave the call naked. Now if the stock goes 5% above where I sold it, I buy back the call with typically minimum loss. If I'm lucky, the stock will drop enough to make the call out of money again, but more often than not, the option will remain somewhat in the money, but I get to collect the time premium as well as all the profits from the stock sale.
You can't do this with every stock. You need two almost mutually exclusive conditions (I say almost because you can find such stocks). You want stocks that are not too volatile (I'd never do this with Micron, but I did it with Iomega) and you want high implied volatility.
You also need a vision of sorts of where the stock is headed. Often I use other stocks in the segment as a proxy for what to expect on this one. The Iomega story is a good example. I saw falling disk drive prices and my talks with SEG and WDC told me there will be no relief soon. Since at some level a hard drive competes with a Jazz drive, when Iomega started to drop (and it dropped slowly at first) I got out quickly. I had made 7 points on the stock and another 3 points on selling the option. The option was $3 in the money and still two months to expiration. For me to lose money IOM would have to go up another 7 points and I could cut my losses before then. As it happend, Iomega closed below $15 on Feb and in the hind sight I should have shorted it hand over fist, but that would have been too much exposure to one stock.
Now if I had the resources to do it, and was willing to watch the tape every minute, then I'd delta hedge myself instead of an all or nothing scenario. But this was not too bad either.
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