OptionToolkit's FAQs

A repeating income cycle. You sell a cash-secured put on a stock you would be happy to own, and collect the premium. If the put expires worthless, you sell another. If you get assigned, you own the shares at a discount to where they traded, and you sell covered calls against them for more premium until the shares are called away. Then the wheel starts again. optiontoolkit tracks every turn of that cycle as one record per symbol, with the cost basis carried through correctly.

Pick a stock you would genuinely hold, sell a put at a strike you would be glad to buy at, and keep the cash to cover assignment. In optiontoolkit that is: run the Best Practice Wheel Screen, open a row you like, and hit Log trade. The entry checklist shows delta, days to expiry, position sizing and earnings timing against your own rules before you commit anything at your broker.

Businesses you would hold for months even if the trade goes against you, with liquid options so you are not paying a wide spread on every leg. The screener bakes this in: it covers about 1,500 US large and mid caps, scores fundamentals, growth and technicals out of ten, and only surfaces contracts that pass open-interest and spread checks.

Three habits, all built into the app: size each position small (the default rules cap any one symbol at 5-10% of trading capital), keep roughly half your capital in reserve (the cash-reserve gauge tracks this), and spread across sectors (the dashboard shows your book against all eleven sectors). Breaking a rule is allowed, but it takes a deliberate override and gets written to your journal.

You sell a put option and set aside enough cash to buy 100 shares per contract at the strike price if assigned. The premium is yours to keep either way. It is the entry gate of the wheel: either you keep collecting premium, or you buy a stock you wanted at a price you chose.

Strike times 100 per contract. A $50 put needs $5,000 set aside. optiontoolkit shows the collateral for every position and warns when a new trade would push one symbol past your concentration cap or eat into your cash reserve.

Weeklies pay more theta per day but carry far more gamma: once a short-dated put moves against you, your exposure compounds fast, and one bad week can erase several good ones. The 30-45 day window collects more premium per trade, leaves a wider breakeven, gives a position time to recover, and fits the 50% early buyback rhythm. The full argument, with numbers, is on why 30-45 DTE beats weeklies.

You buy 100 shares per contract at the strike. In optiontoolkit the wheel flips to its covered-call phase automatically: assignment freezes your entry cost basis, every premium you collected is already counted against it, and the next best action suggests selling a call at or above that adjusted basis so an exit locks in a profit rather than a loss.

Selling a call option against 100 shares you own. You collect premium; if the stock finishes above the strike, your shares are sold at that price. On assigned shares it is how the wheel earns its way back to cash.

The rule optiontoolkit checks by default: at or above your adjusted net cost, which is your assignment price minus every premium collected on that wheel. Selling below it risks locking in a loss, and the app blocks that entry unless you explicitly override. Above that floor, closer strikes pay more premium and further strikes leave more upside.

Your shares are sold at the strike. optiontoolkit records the called-away exit, closes the wheel, tags its outcome, and the realized P/L including every premium along the way lands in your performance numbers. Most wheelers then start the next cycle with a new put.

The default rules treat covered calls as short, repeatable repair: 7 to 10 days out, sold again after each expiry while you hold the shares. Cash-secured puts run longer, 30 to 45 days. Both windows are your rules to edit on the Rules page.

Every night it scores about 1,500 optionable US stocks on fundamentals, growth and technicals, each out of ten. Every 15 minutes during market hours it scans their option chains for cash-secured put candidates 30 to 47 days out, inside a sensible delta band, clear of earnings, and pairs each stock with its best contract. You filter by any score or option metric, and every row has Log trade and a watchlist star.

The premium divided by the cash you tie up, scaled to a full year. It makes a 30-day trade and a 45-day trade comparable at a glance. A $1.20 premium on a $40 strike over 36 days is about 30% annualized. The screener computes it on every contract so you can sort by what the capital actually earns.

Delta is a rough stand-in for the chance the option finishes in the money. The scan only stages puts between roughly 0.19 and 0.35 delta, and the default filter narrows to 0.22 to 0.32: enough premium to be worth selling, far enough out that assignment is the exception. Drag the band lower for safer entries, higher for richer ones.

We show delta and distance from the strike instead. They carry the same information as a probability estimate, but they are computed exactly from the chain rather than modeled, and you can check them against your broker. We would rather show two honest numbers than one estimated one.

Contracts rescan every 15 minutes during market hours and stock scores refresh nightly, so a daily look is plenty. Many wheel traders check once in the first hour of the session, place their trades, and are done. The daily digest email covers the other direction: it tells you when an open position needs a decision.

Yes. Adjust anything and hit Save as my default; the screen opens that way from then on. Six built-in presets sit alongside it, and Reset gets you back to the Best Practice Wheel Screen in one click.

Star any screener row, or type a symbol on the Watchlist page. The watchlist is laid out as a calendar: symbols down, expiry weeks across, with your open positions and earnings dates drawn on it, so crowded weeks are visible before you add to them. Free accounts watch up to 15 symbols; paid plans have no cap.

The market's guess at how much a stock will move, and the main driver of how much premium you collect. High IV pays more but moves more. The screener shows each contract's IV next to the stock's realized volatility (IV/RV), so you can tell premium that is rich from premium that is just fair pay for a wild stock. IV rank, each symbol ranked against its own history, drives the rules tiers.

The gap between what buyers pay and sellers ask. It is a real cost you pay twice, entering and exiting. The screener filters out contracts with wide spreads by default because a thick premium on a thin market usually is not collectable at the printed price.

Earnings are the biggest scheduled risk in a short put's life. The default rules skip earnings cycles entirely: the screener hides contracts with earnings before expiry, the watchlist calendar marks every report date, and the trade form blocks an entry that spans one unless you deliberately override.

Premium collected divided by the capital secured, then annualized by the days at risk. optiontoolkit computes it the same way on every surface, and for covered calls it measures against your adjusted cost basis rather than the market price. Every derived number comes from one shared, tested module, and each wheel's timeline shows the legs behind it.

Lower delta (0.19 to 0.25), strikes further out of the money, spread kept tight, high fundamental and growth scores, and the earnings gate left on. You collect less per trade and get assigned less often. Save it as your default and the screen opens that way.

Delta toward 0.30 to 0.35, the High Premium preset, and a higher annualized-yield floor. More premium, more assignments; the wheel still works, you just spend more time in the covered-call phase. The concentration and reserve rules matter more, not less, at this end.

Every trade, synced or manual, lands on a wheel timeline with premium collected, realized P/L, true cost basis and annualized return. The Performance page shows income by month, an equity curve, and your portfolio against SPY over the same window with both drawdowns. A journal records every rule override automatically, plus anything you write yourself.

It is the wrong tool for that. Everything here is built around a cycle measured in weeks: 30 to 45 day puts, weekly covered calls, decisions once a day. If you want to scalp intraday moves, you want a different product.

Neither, ever. It screens, records, and checks your own written rules against your own entries. You place every order at your broker. Broker connections are read-only, and a high score is a ranking on criteria you control, not a recommendation.

Interactive Brokers syncs every 15 minutes during market hours. Schwab, Robinhood, Fidelity, Alpaca, tastytrade and Webull connect in about a minute and refresh daily. Everything else is covered by manual entry, which lands on the same wheel timelines. Details per broker are on the brokers page.

Stock prices carry a 15-minute delay and the screener footer shows exactly when each layer last updated: scores, option scan, and prices. When a feed goes stale the app says so instead of presenting an old number as current. Official closing prices reconcile nightly.

The web app is built to work well on a phone: the tab bar, tables and forms all adapt. There is no separate app to install, and nothing to keep updated.

The free plan tracks 3 active wheels forever, includes a 15-symbol watchlist and performance analytics, and the full screener for your first 14 days. The Founder plan is $19 a month for everything, locked in for as long as you stay subscribed. Pro is $29 a month or $299 a year. Full comparison on the pricing page.

Two clicks on the Billing page: Cancel plan, confirm. Your plan stays active until the end of the period you paid for, then drops to Free. Your wheels and records are untouched, and you can resume any time before the period ends.

The usual reason is timing. Interactive Brokers through SnapTrade refreshes once a day, so trades from today arrive with tomorrow's statement; direct IBKR Flex sync runs every 15 minutes in market hours. Check Sync health on the Accounts / Sync page for the last run and its result, and look at the Inbox there for fills that did not match a position. A manual Sync now button covers the impatient case.

Always, on every plan. One-click CSV exports of wheels, legs and journal, with the derived numbers included. Your records are never captive.

If you signed up with Google, use the Google button; it also works if you originally registered with the same email and a password. Otherwise write to support@optiontoolkit.app with your registered email address; and we will help you!