Getting Started
What OptyTrades actually does
OptyTrades is a set of tools for people who sell options on stocks they would be willing to own — the strategy usually called the wheel. It finds the candidates, shows you the chart and the chain, lets you practise the trade before you place it, and keeps an honest record of how it went. This page is a tour of each piece.
The tools
The Screener
Finds candidates worth a closer look.
Every session it scans more than 8,000 US stocks and narrows them to the 1,000 to 1,200 that are actually workable for selling options — enough size, enough liquidity, a real options market. Each one gets a wheel score and an options grade so a long list becomes a short one, and you can filter it down further by price, sector, premium, quality and dozens of other columns.
The Chart Desk
Any listed ticker, not just the screened ones.
Up to eight slots on one desk, each holding a chart, an options chain, the entry signals or a strategy builder, arranged how you like and saved as a layout you can reopen. More than forty studies, drawing tools, pattern and wave analysis, and your own positions drawn on the price so you can see where a trade sits.
The Trade Journal
Every trade you have taken, and what it actually earned.
Log puts, calls, share lots, spreads, long options and covered strangles by hand, paste a row from your broker, or import a statement from Schwab, Fidelity, Interactive Brokers or Tastytrade. It works out premium, realised stock gains, return on the capital that was tied up, and how each name has really done — including the ones you would rather not look at.
Paper Trading
Practise with virtual money and real market prices.
A journal account funded with pretend cash, where you place orders through a broker-style ticket instead of typing trades in. Orders fill at real market prices, expiries resolve on their own, and assignment happens the way it would. None of it touches your track record, so it is a safe place to make the mistakes worth making once.
Community
Other people doing the same thing, in the open.
Chat rooms where setups get argued about as they happen, and a trade feed where members post the trade itself — the strike, the expiry, the premium and the outcome, win or lose. Tickers link straight through to the screener, so a conversation about a name is one click from the numbers behind it.
Your Trading Plan
Your own rules, written down and checked.
Six plain questions, starting with how much you could stand to lose on one stock that never comes back. Your answers become rules in your own words, and your open positions are checked against them whenever you look. It never blocks a trade — it tells you where you stand against what you said you would do.
The Bag Map
Which names you can afford to be wrong about.
Every stock you hold plotted by how well the business could survive a bad year against how rich its options premium is. Four corners, and a different approach in each — the difference between a name you would happily own and one you only ever want to collect premium on.
Alerts
Tells you when something you care about changes.
Set conditions on a price, a position or a stock's situation and get an email when they are met, so you are not refreshing a page to find out. Useful for the quiet things that matter — an earnings date landing inside an expiry, or a position moving against you.
Opty's Picks and the AI Trader
Worked examples you can audit, not recommendations.
A weekly shortlist of candidates, and portfolios that run the wheel automatically and log every decision they make — including the wrong ones. Both are in beta, both are educational, and both are published with their mistakes intact rather than tidied up afterwards.
Calculators and Planners
The arithmetic, before you commit.
Work out what a contract actually pays, what a position ties up, what an income target would take, and how a plan compounds over years. Free tools that answer a specific question without you opening a spreadsheet.
Where the numbers come from
Prices, options chains and Greeks come from the SIP consolidated feed covering all sixteen US exchanges — the same institutional-quality data broker-dealers work from. Nothing here is scraped from a web page or estimated from a model. Company fundamentals and analyst consensus come from a separate source, because they are a different kind of number, and the two are never blended into one figure.
Everything on the site is educational. It describes what the market is doing and where your positions stand — it does not tell you what to buy or sell, and it never places a trade for you.
How to start
- 1
Create a free account
No credit card. During beta every member gets every feature.
- 2
Find a name you would be happy to own
Start in the screener. The wheel only works on stocks you do not mind holding, so that is the filter that matters before any premium number does.
- 3
Practise it on paper first
Place the trade in a paper account and watch what happens through to expiry. It costs nothing to find out you had the wrong idea.
- 4
Log everything, from the first trade
A journal you started late is a journal that cannot tell you much. Logging from the beginning is what turns a year of trades into something you can actually learn from.
New to selling options? Start with what the wheel strategy is — it explains the whole cycle with worked examples before you touch a single tool. Members can read the full guide for how each feature works in depth.