Practical, plain-English articles for people who sell cash-secured puts and covered calls. Start at the top if you are new, or jump to what you need.
Collateral, premium income, return on capital, annualized return, breakeven, and max profit. No sign-in.
Premium yield, annualized return, profit if called away, breakeven, and downside protection from your cost basis.
Chain a cash-secured put into assignment and covered calls to see the cost-basis reduction and total return.
The full cycle — cash-secured puts, assignment, covered calls — with a worked example and the real risks.
How the two legs of the wheel differ in risk, capital, and what each one is really betting on.
What to record for each leg so you can see a wheel’s true return instead of disconnected trades.
A checklist for picking underlyings you can live with owning: liquidity, volatility, fundamentals, and what to avoid.
The errors that quietly cost wheel traders the most, from oversizing to chasing premium to bad record keeping.
Using delta, premium, and your own assignment tolerance to pick strikes for puts and calls.
What a roll actually does, the main kinds of roll, and the traps that make rolling look better than it is.
When short options get assigned before expiration, and how dividends change the odds.
How much capital to commit per ticker, and how cash-secured collateral limits what you can run.
Why premium is high or low, what IV rank tells you, and why rich premium is a warning as much as an opportunity.
What to do when assigned shares keep falling: calls below basis, patience, rolling, and knowing when to exit.
How premium lowers what you effectively paid, and why tracking basis differs from tax basis.
Why 2% in 30 days is not 24% a year, and a calculator for return, breakeven, and annualized yield.
How premiums, assignment, and holding periods flow into capital gains, plus wash-sale and covered-call pitfalls.
OptionsLoop next to a spreadsheet, WheelTracking, WheelTracker, and Option Wheel Tracker. Competitor details are cited, as of October 2026.
What stays manual when the wheel lives in Excel or Google Sheets, and what OptionsLoop links for you.
Price, accounts, export, community, and how each privacy policy treats trade data.
A synced Google account compared with the local-first tracker at yourwheeltracker.com.
A free plan and a Premium subscription compared with a one-time license.
Plain-English definitions of the wheel, assignment, rolling, spreads, implied volatility, and theta decay.
For educational purposes only, not financial advice, and not tax or legal advice. Options trading involves substantial risk, including the potential loss of your entire investment. OptionsLoop is a tracking tool, not a broker or investment adviser, and does not recommend specific securities or strategies. Examples use made-up prices for illustration.