Every other return figure in the Journal answers how much did I make. The Capital view answers a different question, and it is the one that decides whether a wheel is actually working: what did each dollar earn for every day it was tied up?

Those are not the same question, and the gap between them is where premium sellers quietly lose. Two trades can bank identical dollars on identical collateral and be wildly different businesses — if one held that collateral for a week and the other held it for six. Only one figure on the platform puts time in the denominator, and it lives here.

You'll find it on the Trade Journal — the third tab in the Journal · Wheels · Capital switcher, top right.

A cash-secured put doesn't just cost you premium risk. It costs you the use of the collateral for as long as it's open. A $30 put escrows $3,000. Held seven days, it consumed 21,000 capital-days (3,000 × 7). Held forty-two days, the very same contract consumed 126,000.

Divide the dollars earned by that capital-time and you get a rate that compares anything to anything. Say both of those trades collected $100:

Same premium. Same collateral. Same ticker, even. Six times the efficiency. The Journal's other return figures score those two trades identically, because none of them know how long the money was committed.

The top strip splits your account into the capital that was working and the capital that was idle, averaged across the period rather than measured this instant. That distinction matters: the Capital Deployed bar at the top of the Journal is a snapshot of right now, while this is the average the return figures actually divide by. A position open for eleven days of a ninety-day window counts for eleven days, not ninety.

The fourth tile is the one people misread. “Idle capital at that rate” takes the uncommitted dollars and asks what they'd have added if they'd earned what your working dollars earned. If $40,000 sat idle while your deployed capital returned 29.5%, that's about $11,800.

Below the strip, every ticker you've closed a position on, ranked by what its capital-time earned. Column by column:

An open put is consuming collateral this second, but it hasn't settled a return. Folding its capital-days into the rate would divide real earnings by capital-time that hasn't finished earning yet, dragging the number down for no reason other than that the trade is still running.

So it gets its own column. Still open tells you how much capital-time a name is currently absorbing — useful on its own, and honest about the fact that its verdict isn't in. A dash means nothing open on that ticker.

A name with a big Still open figure and a thin Capital-days figure is one where most of the story hasn't been told yet. Treat its rate as provisional.

The last section is a snapshot rather than an average: what's tied up on each name right now, as a share of the account. Amber marks a ticker above the per-ticker limit set on your account (Max % / Ticker in the Journal header — 15% by default).

This existed before, technically: it was buried inside the tooltip on the coloured dot beside a symbol. One row at a time, on hover. Seeing the whole book ranked at once is a different experience, and concentration is not a thing you notice one row at a time.

The page describes conditions; the decisions are yours. Some questions it can answer that nothing else could:

Which names deserve the collateral? A ticker paying 40% annualized on capital-time is doing twice the work of one paying 20%, regardless of which shows a bigger dollar figure. Big P/L on enormous capital-days is a name that pays well because you keep giving it half the account, not because it's efficient.

Is the tenor working? If your 40-day trades consistently annualize below your 7-day trades on the same names, that's the term structure telling you something — and it's the observation behind closing winners early: a position at 80% captured with three weeks left is renting your collateral cheaply for those three weeks.

Is the idle cash deliberate? Sitting at 45% idle in a fearful market is a different fact than sitting at 45% idle at VIX 14. Cross-read it with the Fear & Greed section in the Journal, which shows what the model allocates at today's reading.

Is one name quietly taking over? The concentration list against your own limit, which you set for a reason.

Collateral, not downside. A $30 put is counted at $3,000 committed. Its true worst case is $3,000 minus the premium collected, and a share lot is counted at what you paid, not what it's worth today. This measures capital occupied, not capital at risk — those are different numbers and the page doesn't reconcile them.

Small samples lie loudly. A single trade that lost $30 on $3,600 of capital-days annualizes to −308%, which says almost nothing about the ticker. Read the Trades column before reading the rate.

It's history, not a forecast. Every figure is what settled. A name that annualized 137% did so; nothing here claims it will again.