Open a raw options chain and you get a wall of numbers — dozens of strikes, two sides, greeks and implied volatility on every row. It’s data, but it isn’t an answer.
For longer than I’d like to admit, I read chains the way I suspect most people do: scroll until a premium looked fat enough, decide that seemed like decent money for a month, sell it. That isn’t analysis — it’s a hunch with a bid-ask spread attached. The question I was actually trying to answer was far simpler than the screen made it look: if I sell this option, what do I make, and is that a good rate for the risk?
Everything below is how I learned to turn the chain into that answer. It’s also, indirectly, a description of what StrategyXL does and doesn’t do about it.
Two setups do most of the work for income:
For either one, the raw chain gives you the premium (roughly the mid-price between bid and ask). The premium alone isn’t enough to judge the trade — you need to relate it to the capital it ties up. That’s the step I used to skip, and skipping it is why a “$300 premium!” can be a worse trade than a $90 one.
The number that matters is return on the capital at risk:
Divide the premium by that capital and you have the return for the life of the trade. A $120 credit against $5,000 of secured capital is a 2.4% return — but over what period? That’s the piece people skip, and it’s the piece that makes options comparable.
A 2.4% return over 9 days is a very different animal from 2.4% over 45 days. To compare them, put both on the same axis by annualizing:
annualized % = return × (365 / days to expiration)
That 9-day, 2.4% put is roughly 97% annualized; the 45-day version is about 19%. Same headline number, wildly different rate. Annualizing is the only way to shop across expirations fairly.
One honest caveat, and it’s one I had to decide deliberately when I built this into the tool: use simple annualization (the formula above), not a compounded CAGR. Compounding a fixed-capital, capped-risk credit trade — pretending you’ll flawlessly redeploy the same capital forty times a year, never miss a week, never take a loss — flatters the number well past the point of usefulness. It would have made my own results look considerably better than they were. That’s exactly why the column is labeled Annual % and not anything that sounds like a CAGR. It’s a yardstick for comparing trades against each other, not a projection of yearly income.
If you’re buying shares specifically to write a call against them and get called away — a Buy-Write — the interesting number isn’t the premium, it’s the total return if you’re assigned:
if-called return = premium collected + (strike − your cost) × 100 + dividends collected while holding
That folds three things into one figure: the premium, the capital gain up to the strike, and any dividends you capture before assignment. Divide by your net cost, annualize, and you finally know whether the whole package is worth doing — not just whether the premium looks fat.
All of this math assumes the trade runs to expiration — that’s exactly what the “days to expiration” in the annualization is measuring. But American-style equity options can be assigned early, and the most common trigger is a dividend: when a call is in the money and its remaining time value is less than the upcoming dividend, exercising the day before the ex-dividend date to capture that dividend is often the rational move for whoever is on the other side.
That isn’t automatically a bad outcome — being called away early on a covered call usually means you collected the premium and the gain up to the strike in less time, which is a higher annualized rate than you planned. But it does mean the dividend you were counting on may never arrive, and a trade you thought had 30 days left has zero. Worth knowing before you lean too hard on an if-called number with dividends folded into it. (For why dividends move prices in the first place, see split-only vs. total return.)
None of this math is hard. But doing it by hand across a dozen strikes and two expirations is tedious and error-prone — which is precisely why I spent years eyeballing the premium instead. The Options tools in StrategyXL resolve the legs off your live chain and compute the credit, capital at risk, return, and annualized % for covered calls, cash-secured puts, and vertical credit spreads — and the full if-called math (with dividends prorated in) for Buy-Writes. You pick strikes by delta or price (or %OTM on a Buy-Write); it does the rest.
What it deliberately doesn’t do: place the trade. The Schwab connection is read-only by design — it reads your chain and your quotes, and it cannot send an order. That’s a line I don’t intend to cross.
What it isn’t: a probability model. The chain shows the short leg’s delta as a rough proxy for assignment odds, and delta is a decent stand-in for “probability of finishing in the money” — but it is a stand-in, not a real probability-of-profit calculation, and I’d rather say so than dress it up.
What it can’t be: continuously live on its own. The chain is a snapshot — accurate the moment you pull it, stale the moment the market moves. That’s the honest limit of a snapshot, and it’s why clicking a setup row opens the Setups Monitor, which streams just that setup so you can actually watch it. Snapshot to find, stream to watch.
The math here isn’t the hard part, and no tool can tell you which stock is worth writing against — that judgment is still yours, and it should be. What a tool can do is make sure that once you’ve picked one, you’re comparing the real trades on the same honest, annualized footing, instead of picking whichever premium happened to look biggest on a screen.
That’s the whole ambition: fewer decisions made on the size of a number you never put in context.
If you have feedback on any of this — a metric you’d want added, or a place where you think I’ve oversimplified — or check the public roadmap.
Everything here is raw material for your own analysis, not a recommendation or financial advice.
