I have been trying to use Lookback for covered calls. The results are well, puzzling.

For example, go to Lookback and enter a covered-call on SPY for the 45-day expiry at the 30 delta. Don't use any of the check-boxes for exiting early or taking profits or anything.

The result is an average profit per trade of $130. But, the puzzling thing is that "premium collected" is a negative number. For premium collected I get $-23615.19 in the average column. This makes no sense to me, you can't lose premium on a covered call. The downside of a covered call is the capped upside.

What does this result actually mean? The premium collected row indicates that the strategy is unprofitable while the profit-per-trade or profit-per-day rows suggest that it is profitable.