"I could have sold calls to at least make my original purchase price along with some profits to boot."

You got my vote and vote of any thinkorswimmer :-) 

No, Ive done spread trades before and the only benifit I get is staying in a losing position longer with the hope of it commin back.  Once I have the direction right and a profit - its time to exit the spread buy buying back the sold short position, or moving out to a longer short position. holding them to the end often works against me.   example I bought chk may 52 1/2 and sold the 55 for may. the stock closed at 58.   I lost a lot of potential profit. I should have bought back the 55  when chk hit 55.  at that point I could have sold the 57.5 or just run with the 52 1/2 long.

I hold the vlo 50 calls and sold the vlo 55 calls  my lose was less today so Im holding a losing position hoping for a comeback. If I didnt have the 55 sold I would probably be stopped out on the 50 call. 

Another thing that happens with the spreads is once your strike price is reached the time works for you  rather than against you.  you end up hoping time will expire before the price action reverses.   example-- once chk hit 55    I was hoping the time would run out instead of wishing I had more time left.

OK, I see your point about the time decay. But in the case of DRYS, I bought very early when the PPS was around $68 and had the $110 strike with over 30 days to go when the PPS hit $105 range. I was WAY into the money and was still very bullish with a target PPS of $160 for the year.

 Now with that all said, I could have sold $120 or higher strike price and got my original premium and a small profit. Then the spread would have been playing with the "house's money." My chart was screaming that DRYS was going to retrace.

 So when the short term chart said it may retrace, I just sold and moved on until it looked better for a re-entry. But if I had the capital from selling the CALLS as desribed above, I could have bought another position in DRYS with a later expiration since I am still bullish on the stock.

 I would love to have seen the math on this senario to know which startegy would pay off better if indeed DRYS has finished it's retrace and will continue to move up. We may be talking the same thing here and I just wanted to clarify my original post.