One of the benefits of trading options is that you can adjust a position to either lock in profits or limit risk. But just because you can tinker with an options trade doesn’t always mean you should.

Adjustments are often discussed in terms of how to "repair" a losing trade by changing a trade’s risk profile to fit a different market outlook. The following discussion instead focuses on adjusting a profitable long call position. A long call can act as a building block for various spreads — bull call spreads, call ratio spreads, or butterflies — that can be tailored to different market forecasts.

Also, the same techniques can be applied to a long put. The goal in either case is to extract as much profit as possible when the underlying market moves in your direction.