Managing Winners and The Underwater Put both end at the same doorstep: sooner or later the answer to “what now?” involves a roll — buying back the contract you're short and selling another one at a different date, and sometimes a different strike. Those chapters teach the arithmetic. The Roll Analyzer does the arithmetic, for every candidate contract at once, so the comparison happens in one view instead of across six broker tabs and a calculator.

You'll find it on any open cash-secured put or covered call in the Trade Journal, and it comes to meet you when a position needs it: rows in the Position Health panel that are in the money or running thin carry an Analyze roll button, and the same positions show a small roll icon in the trade table beside the Edit pencil — red when ITM, amber when the cushion is thin. On healthy rows it lives in the row's actions menu (the … at the right-hand end) under Analyze roll. Spreads are deliberately excluded — rolling a spread moves two legs, and a tool that priced only one of them would be describing half a trade.

The panel opens with two lines that place the position before any candidate appears:

Line one is the plan you originally signed up for: the premium collected per share, the open date, and the annualized return the trade earns if it simply expires worthless — premium over collateral over the days from open to expiry, scaled to a year. It is computed with the same arithmetic as the journal's own Ann. RoR column, so the two can never disagree about the same trade.

Line two is where reality currently prices that plan: what buying the contract back costs right now, what percentage of the premium that capture represents, and the dollar figure closing today would book — green if the buyback locks in a gain, red if it books a loss. On a winner this line reads like a scoreboard; on an underwater put it states, plainly, the debt the roll is being asked to pay.

If your position's earnings date falls inside every candidate below, the strip says so once, in one sentence, rather than repeating a warning icon on each column.

The grid is a slice of the option chain arranged around your position: columns are expiries, from your current expiry out to roughly five months past it — weeklies where the chain lists them, monthlies beyond — and rows are strikes, the ones listed nearest your current strike. Your own contract sits in it as a labeled current chip with its assignment odds, so every candidate reads as a change from where you stand rather than an absolute.

The amber line running through the strikes is the stock's price. Everything on the assignment side of that line — above it for a put, below it for a call — is in the money, and its strike labels are tinted to match. This is the same orientation a broker chain gives you: one glance says which candidates are collecting more because they are taking more risk.

Each cell carries two numbers:

The big one is the net credit or debit per share — what the candidate contract pays, minus what buying back your current contract costs. Green cells are net credits, and the background deepens with the size of the credit, so the eye finds the money without reading every figure. A negative number means the roll costs you cash today; those cells stay deliberately dim.

The small one is credit per added day — the net credit divided by the extra days the roll commits your capital. This is the number that makes columns comparable: a $0.44 credit for 35 extra days and a $2.07 credit for 126 extra days are hard to rank as raw figures, but 1.3¢/day against 1.6¢/day is a fair fight. Cells in your current expiry's column add no days, so they show the candidate's assignment odds instead.

A dash means the chain simply doesn't list that strike at that expiry, or the contract hasn't traded at a price we can stand behind. Prices come from each contract's most recent session trade — the same source the journal's live columns use — and the footer stamps the time the figures were taken. Hovering any cell shows its mark, the price's source, and the contract's open interest.

Clicking a cell turns it into a decision you can actually read: a card comparing the position you hold against the position the roll would leave you holding.

Strike and expiry state the move itself, with the days added. Ann. return puts your original plan's rate next to the new leg's own rate — the new contract's premium over its own collateral over its own days. That second figure is exactly what the journal will print on the new row once the roll is booked, so what you approve here is what you see there. It shows green when the new leg keeps or beats your planned rate and amber when it trades rate away for something else — usually safety.

Assignment odds compare the market's current odds on your strike against the candidate's — the same ~delta figure as the journal's Assign column. Breakeven shows where your all-in level moves once the roll's net credit joins the premium you already collected — on a down-and-out roll this is usually the number that tells the real story. Collateral shows the cash the new strike ties up. And the money line beneath adds it up in dollars: what the buyback costs, what the new leg collects, and the net across your contract count.

If the stock reports earnings inside the candidate's contract period, the card says so — the single most common surprise hiding inside a long roll, since a date that was safely outside a 47-day contract is often inside a 173-day one.

For an in-the-money put, “which roll?” is often the wrong question. The wheel's own answer to a put that finishes ITM is to take the shares and sell covered calls against them — and sometimes that path simply collects more than any roll on the board. So when the analyzed put is ITM, a violet row appears beneath the grid: Assign + CC, one cell per expiry column, each showing the nearest call priced at or above your breakeven — your strike minus the premium you collected.

Calls below breakeven are not shown at all, on purpose: a call written under your all-in cost locks in a loss if the shares are called away. And after a hard drop, the nearby columns will often show dashes — that isn't missing data, it is the finding: the call that doesn't lock in a loss only starts paying real premium further out in time. Watching the violet row grow from pennies near-in to real income months out is the “write the further-dated call” decision, made visible.

Clicking a violet cell opens the head-to-head. It states the path in one line — own the shares at your strike, breakeven after premium, the call's income and where it moves your breakeven, and what being called away would book from entry. Two of its facts deserve naming: taking assignment pays no buyback — it settles at exactly the option's intrinsic value, while a deep-ITM buyback crosses a wide spread to pay that same intrinsic in cash — and the shares participate in a recovery dollar for dollar, where a rolled put's recovery is capped at its premium.

Below that sits the outcome table: four scenarios — the stock holding where it is, recovering to your strike, falling another 10%, and ripping past every strike with both paths at their caps — each priced for the assignment path and for the best-credit roll at the same expiry, winner in bold, with an Edge column showing the difference in dollars. When the call and the roll share a strike, you'll notice the edge is the same in every row — identical payoff shapes, so the whole comparison collapses to which side collects more today. When the strikes differ, the scenarios show where each path leads and where the ranking flips.

Ask Opty about this roll sends the selected roll's full picture — your position, the candidate's pricing, the odds change, the breakeven shift, the earnings calendar, the contract's open interest, and the stock's screener context — to Opty, which writes a short plain-language read of the trade-off: what the roll is, what the numbers give, what they cost, and what the decision actually weighs.

On the assignment-path card the button reads Ask Opty — roll, or take assignment? and the take covers the fork itself: which side the computed scenarios favor and by roughly how much, the intrinsic value a roll pays that assignment doesn't, the recovery cap the call accepts, and anything heavy in either period's calendar or liquidity.

Either way, Opty describes; it does not decide. It will say plainly when one side of the trade-off is heavy — a net debit, earnings inside the new period, open interest thin enough that getting filled needs patience — but it frames the choice rather than making it, for the same reason every figure on this platform describes conditions: the decisions stay yours. Each member gets a generous daily allowance of takes, and asking about the same roll twice within a few minutes returns the same answer rather than spending another one.

Use this roll… closes the loop: it opens the journal's regular roll form with the candidate's strike, expiry and premium — and the buyback price of your current leg — already filled in. Nothing books directly from the analyzer. The form is the same one described in Trade Journal & Sizing: every figure stays editable, your actual fill prices belong there once you've traded, and the confirmation step shows the buyback's P/L before anything saves. Booked that way, the closed leg and the new leg stay linked — so the position's full premium history, roll by roll, reads as one story in the journal.

It will not rank the cells, score the candidates, or name a best roll — deliberately. The outcome table bolds the larger of two computed dollar figures, which is arithmetic, not advice: a roll is a trade of money against time and safety, and how much of each you want depends on why you opened the position, what the shares would mean to your account if assigned, and what else your capital could be doing — none of which a grid can know. What it does instead is make sure that when you choose, you chose with every number in front of you.