Sell puts on names you'd happily own, take assignment, sell calls against them. The most recommended options strategy on the internet. We ran it.
[One sentence. The answer, stated plainly, before any explanation. If the honest answer is "it depends," the verdict is Conditional and the condition is named here — not left to the reader to find.]
The wheel is pitched as the closest thing to a free lunch in options. Sell a cash-secured put on a stock you'd be happy to own. If it expires worthless, keep the premium and do it again. If you're assigned, you now own a stock you wanted anyway — so sell covered calls against it until it's called away, collecting premium the whole time.
The appeal is that no outcome looks like a loss. You either keep the premium or you buy a stock you wanted at a discount. That framing is what makes the strategy spread so widely, and it is the specific thing worth testing.
[What was held fixed, what was varied, and why those choices. Anything that would change the answer if chosen differently gets named here, not hidden.]
| Universe | — |
|---|---|
| Entry delta | — |
| Days to expiry | — |
| Exit rule | — |
| Assignment handling | — |
| Commissions & slippage | — |
| Period | — |
[The findings. Every number in this section comes out of the run — none are written by hand. If a figure cannot be traced to the run, it does not appear.]
A strategy can win most of the time and still lose money. What matters is expectancy — average profit per trade once the losses are counted at their real size. A high win rate with a negative expectancy means the wins are small, the losses are rare and large, and the account bleeds slowly enough that it feels like it's working.
Every verdict on this site is decided on expectancy. Win rate is reported because people ask for it, never because it decides anything.
[The rules were fixed on one part of the history and the verdict rests on a part the strategy had never seen. Both numbers go here, along with the distance between them. A verdict of Holds requires the out-of-sample result to stand on its own — a strong full-period figure is not enough on its own.]
| In-sample expectancy | — |
|---|---|
| Out-of-sample expectancy | — |
| Gap between them | — |
| Walk-forward windows | — |
| Variations tested | — |
[If there were too few trades to walk forward, this says so rather than leaving the row blank.]
[Most strategies are neither good nor bad — they are good under conditions and bad outside them. This section names the boundary: the delta, the regime, the tenor, or the rule that flips the verdict. If there isn't one, say so.]
[The honest limits. Survivorship, liquidity assumptions, fills that wouldn't have happened, regimes not covered by the sample, and anything else that would make a careful reader discount the result. Written before publication, not after someone complains.]
[The practical read. Not advice — the conclusion a person running this strategy should draw about their own version of it.]