Options income
Pull the whole chain from your own Charles Schwab connection, and StrategyXL does the analysis a raw chain leaves to you — covered-call, cash-secured-put, and vertical-spread yields, the true called-away return on a Buy-Write, an earnings overlay, a live monitor, and a roll board — all laid out on one Excel sheet.
You pick a symbol and a range of days-to-expiration and set one Reference DTE — the expiration everything keys off. StrategyXL pulls the whole chain in a single read-only call, computes the analytics in-process, and formats four stacked sections next to a mirrored calls / puts table. It's a snapshot: one click re-pulls whenever you want fresh numbers, so you can read the tape, size a trade, and move on — no streaming firehose to babysit.
Always on, anchored to your Reference DTE — the read a raw chain makes you assemble in your head, done for you:
The panel prints its own caveats: early-session volume is noisy, these are heuristics, and it's raw material for your own analysis — not advice.
Define the setups you actually trade and StrategyXL resolves the legs off the live chain and does the return math — covered calls, cash-secured puts, and vertical put / call credit spreads (set the width). Pick each strike by delta or by price.
For every setup you get the credit (at the mid), the net capital at risk, the return on that capital, and an annualized % — so a 9-DTE put and a 45-DTE put are finally comparable on the same axis.
The annualized figure is a simple annualization (return × 365 / DTE), not a compounded CAGR — compounding a fixed-capital, capped-risk credit trade would flatter the number past the point of honesty. It's the yardstick, not a promise.
Buy 100 shares, write a call against them, and plan to get called away. The question that matters is "if I'm assigned, what did I actually make?" — and that's the number StrategyXL computes:
From that you get the return on net cost and its annualized %, your breakeven, the call's delta as a rough assignment-odds proxy, and the strike's %OTM. Two details income traders will appreciate: dividends are prorated over the hold and folded in, and LEAPs land in the same table — target a long-dated call and StrategyXL pulls that expiration in a second targeted request and merges it in, so you never widen the whole chain to reach it.
Snapshot to find, stream to watch
The chain is a snapshot — so how do you watch a setup? Click any income or Buy-Write row and it opens a live Setups Monitor that streams just that setup. Each armed setup shows a three-strike cluster — the target strike shaded, one riskier and one safer flanking it — and the whole grid (credit, capital at risk, return, annualized %, liquidity) recomputes on every tick.
For a position you already hold
Given a position you hold, the Roll Analysis board lines up every roll, adjustment, and exit at once — each measured against a CLOSE NOW anchor ("what does it cost to get out today?"). It frames the whole position — credits collected, effective breakeven, cushion — and covers single legs, balanced and unbalanced/ratio spreads, and the structural moves (adjust contracts, morph to a cash-secured put, take assignment). Every number is live.
Options data comes from your own Charles Schwab connection —
you bring your own credentials, they're stored encrypted on your PC, and
nothing routes through a StrategyXL server. StrategyXL only ever calls
market-data endpoints; there is no order or account endpoint anywhere in the product, and that's enforced in code, not just by convention. See
Live Data for how the connection works and the live sXL_ formulas you can build your own monitors from.
Not $165 to $2,400 every year. An optional annual renewal keeps the research and live-data feeds current — everything else is yours to keep.
StrategyXL is a research and testing tool — everything it shows is raw material for your own analysis, not a signal service and not financial advice.
StrategyXL is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. "Charles Schwab" is a trademark of its respective owner.
Questions? — every message gets a real reply.
