Right now you can earn big, double-digit “Instant Yields” from some of the safest stocks in the world.

For example, we’ve found yields as high as 17.4% from Kraft Foods (Nasdaq: KFT)… 17.0% from Disney (NYSE: DIS)… and even as much as 18.1% from tech giant Intel (Nasdaq: INTC).

#-ad_banner-#This isn’t some investment gimmick, either. The payouts I’m talking about are settled in cash. That is, every time you get one of these payments, the money is added to your brokerage account almost instantly.

Take a gander at the incredible yields we’re finding from some of the market’s best-known stocks…

At first glance, these payouts may seem impossible. After all, a quick look at Yahoo Finance tells us that none of these stocks pay more than 3.5% a year.

So how are investors earning so much income from giant brand name stocks like Kraft Foods, Disney and Intel?

It’s easy. They’re selling covered calls.

On the surface, selling covered calls seems like a complex concept. It involves options, an investing tool most investors don’t know much about to begin with.

But used properly, selling covered calls can be one of the market’s most lucrative investment strategies — especially for income investors. That’s because covered calls allow market investors to take advantage of the dividends from their holdings — while also collecting extra “instant income” checks on the side.

Here’s how Profitable Trading’s resident options expert, Amber Hestla, explains how it works…

When we write a call option contract, we create a contract that says we will sell the underlying shares to the option owner at the specified price (called the “strike price”), if it is met.

In return, we receive a cash payment upfront from the option buyer. Depending on how many of these contracts you sell, the payments you receive can reach well into thousands of dollars.

A “covered” call is when you personally own the underlying shares for the option you write. This helps reduce your risk, while making it easier to access the huge payments available from writing call options.

Best of all, if the stock stays below the “strike price” you specify in the option contract (you get to choose the strike price), then the option is said to expire worthless. That’s good for us.

To see how covered calls work, let’s use Intel as an example.

You’ve probably heard of Intel before. It’s the world’s largest microprocessor maker. In fact, if you own a PC or laptop, odds are it has “Intel Inside.” But now, more than ever, Intel components are making their way into more and more “smart” devices.

As such a big player in the tech industry, you wouldn’t expect Intel to offer investors much of an opportunity to snag big yields. And in fact, by itself, the stock is only paying $0.90 a year in dividends — or 3.5% annually.

But while 3.5% isn’t bad (especially considering the S&P 500 pays only 1.9%), it’s only a fraction of the income you can earn from this tech giant. As we said earlier, we’ve found a way to collect $480 in cash — equal to an 18.1% “yield” — by selling covered calls on it.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how that trade would look…

The first step to executing any covered call strategy is to make sure you first own the underlying shares of the security (that’s what the “covered” means). For Intel, that would include going out and buying 100 shares (more on that in a second) of the stock at today’s share price of $26.54.

Once you’ve bought the shares, now you’re ready to write a “call” option on them. While that may sound like a difficult process, it’s really not. Just tell your broker that you would like to sell a covered call, and they’ll be happy to execute the trade for you. You can even use this strategy with most retirement accounts.

The amount of money you receive from selling the option depends on how high you set the strike price away from the stock’s current price. The closer the strike price is to its current price, the more money you receive in premiums.

Right now you can sell February calls on Intel with a $27 strike price for $0.48 a share. Since each contract represents 100 shares, we would collect roughly $48 of what I call “instant income” when we sell the option ($0.48 x 100 shares).

If on February 21 (the day the option expires) Intel is trading below $27 a share, then we would retain the shares, and the money we collected from selling the option is ours to keep as pure profit.

If the reverse happens, and Intel is trading above $27 the day the option expires, then we would still get to keep the $48, but we would also be required to sell the shares for $27 — 1.7% above where we purchased them.

It’s something of a win-win strategy: Regardless of whether the option you sold expires worthless or not, you’re still going to make money in the trade.

But the best part about this approach is that as long you own the underlying stock, you can continue to sell covered calls on it — capturing big “instant income” checks every time.

To see how this works, let’s stay with the Intel example.

If we continue to write covered calls on a rolling five-week basis, we could potentially sell ten covered calls on the stock over the course of this year alone. Assuming we receive a similar amount for each contract, the options would generate $480 (10 x $48) in additional earnings annually. Considering our initial investment of $2,654 (what we paid to buy 100 shares in the first place), by selling the covered calls we would generate an 18% annual yield on investment.

You can always scale up to earn more income. In this example, you could earn up to $4,800 a year if you sold covered calls on 1,000 shares.

And that’s from a big, well-known company like Intel. The returns can get even bigger if you’re willing to travel off the beaten path.

For example, in Amber’s new report, “The Powerful Discovery Paying Investors $3,410 (Or More) Every 35 Days,” she gives away the names and ticker symbols of stocks offering the chance to earn payments of $1,575, $2,210 and even $5,100. Simply follow this link to learn more about Amber’s income-generating strategy and eight stocks paying investors thousands in cash every few weeks.