WHEEL WATCHER
Methods
The methods used on this site, and the methods planned next — clearly marked, so planned methods are never mistaken for live ones.
For full formulas and worked examples, see the Methodology page. Educational snapshot only — not financial advice.
Methods in use today
| Method | Status | What it does, in plain English |
|---|---|---|
| BB (20, 2) lower-band touch + 200-day regime filter | LIVE | A ticker fires only when the day's low touches or crosses the lower Bollinger Band (20-day mean minus 2 standard deviations) and the close is above the 200-day simple moving average. A touch below the 200-day is blocked as bearish, not an entry. Example: BMNR touched its lower band on Oct 30, 2026, but closed at 20.18 below its 200-day of 20.94, so no entry. |
| Put window: 45–75 DTE, ~10 delta | LIVE | Only puts 45 to 75 days to expiry, at roughly 10 delta, are shown as entry candidates. The strike shown is the ~10-delta put among strikes with a real bid; if quotes are stale, the fallback is the ~10%-below-spot strike. |
| CUSHION | LIVE | How far the price can fall before hitting the strike. Formula: (spot − strike) / spot × 100. |
| ANN. YIELD | LIVE | Premium annualised over the put's life. Formula: (bid / strike) × (365 / DTE) × 100. It treats the premium as if it repeated every cycle for a year, which it will not — so it is a comparison aid, not a return forecast. |
| Excess vs T-bill | LIVE | ANN. YIELD minus the short-term risk-free rate, so a premium is never mistaken for a high return. Formula: Excess = ANN. YIELD − 4-week T-bill rate. Rate: FRED series DTB4WK; for the Oct 30, 2026 entries it was 3.91% as of Oct 29, 2026. A negative excess does not by itself disqualify a timing setup. |
| Bag-hold flag (0–3) | LIVE | A warning that a stock may be a problem to own at the strike if assigned. One point each for: 5-year return below 0%; realised volatility above 60%; 1-year max drawdown worse than −50% (trailing 252 trading days). A component with too little history is shown as unknown, never as clean — BMNR scores 2/3 with its 5-year return unknown. The flag does not block an entry by itself; it is context. |
Planned methods
None of these is live yet, and no numbers from them appear on this site.
| Method | Status | What it will do, in plain English |
|---|---|---|
| Historical breach gap | PLANNED | Compare the market's implied assignment chance (the put's |delta| from the chain) with the historical breach rate — how often, over 5 years of daily closes, the price actually fell through a strike at a similar distance and expiry. The gap between the two is a check on whether the market is pricing assignment more or less richly than history suggests. |
| Conditional loss given assignment | PLANNED | For the cases where the price did breach, how far did it fall on average — and at the bad end of the range? This turns "how often am I assigned" into "how much does assignment tend to cost when it happens". |
| Post-assignment recovery (30 / 60 / 90 days) | PLANNED | After a breach, how often did the price recover back to the original strike within 30, 60, or 90 days? This matters for a wheel approach, where owning the stock after assignment is part of the plan rather than the end of it. |
| BPS screener method | PLANNED | The method behind the planned bull-put-spread screener: the same timing and honesty checks applied to spread candidates rather than single cash-secured puts. Its exact filters will be documented here when the screener itself is built — they are not set yet, and no screener numbers are shown here. |
Not financial advice. Educational snapshot only. Verify any quote with your broker before trading.