Best options income trackers
Almost every options tool stops at the idea. Very few tell you what the idea earned, and fewer still compare it to just holding the shares, which is the only comparison that settles whether premium selling was worth your time. Here is what exists.
The uncomfortable number is the benchmark. You collected $2,140 in premium across the year on a position, which sounds like a good year, and the stock ran 40 percent while your calls capped you at 12. Premium collected: excellent. Outcome: you would have been better off doing nothing.
A tracker that reports only the first number is flattering you.
1. OptionsKing
Free.
The ledger is the half of the product that is not the screener. It records the trades you tell it you took, tracks how each resolved including assignment, carries the cost basis through, and reports what the strategy actually returned against buy-and-hold on the same shares. The losers stay in the record.
Where it falls down: manual entry, no broker import, and no tax-lot or 1099 reconciliation. If you place 40 trades a month, typing them in will wear thin.
2. A spreadsheet
Free.
Still the most flexible option and the one you will trust most, because every formula is yours. For premium collected per ticker per month it is hard to beat, and it will still open in ten years.
Where it falls down: the benchmark comparison is real work to build, and basis after assignment is where hand-kept sheets go wrong. More on that trade-off.
3. Your broker's statements
Free, already there.
Authoritative for what actually happened, which no third-party tracker can claim, and the source of truth at tax time.
Where it falls down: it reports transactions, not strategy performance. Reconstructing "did the wheel on this ticker beat holding it" from a statement is a manual project.
4. Option Alpha
Pro runs $149 a month, or $99 a month if you pay for the year up front. Two broker promotions drop that to $0 a month if you keep a qualifying balance: $5,000 at Tradier, $10,000 at TradeStation.
Because the bots place the trades, the record keeps itself, and it sits next to the backtest of the strategy that produced them. That pairing is genuinely useful.
Where it falls down: you get it by running your trading through their platform, which is a large commitment for a ledger.
Pricing and features for Option Alpha were read off their own site on August 4, 2026. Prices move, and plans get renamed. Check the current number with them before you spend anything on the strength of this page.
What to record, whatever you use
- Ticker, strategy, strike, expiry, contract count.
- Credit received and the fees, separately. Fees are small per trade and not small per year.
- How it resolved: expired, closed early, assigned, rolled.
- Cost basis before and after. This is the field people skip and the one that invalidates everything downstream.
- What the shares did over the same window, so you have a benchmark rather than a feeling.
Where OptionsKing is weak
It is new. Neither app is in the App Store or on Google Play yet, so today it runs in a browser and that is the whole distribution story. It covers 60 tickers on the public data pages, not five thousand. It does one strategy family, premium selling, and it has nothing to say about spreads, calendars, or anything you would put on in a directional bet.
And the gate cuts both ways. On the first public snapshot, taken in a dead-flat low-volatility tape, not one strike across all 60 names cleared the 75 bar. Zero. A screener with a looser bar would have handed you a full page of ideas that week, and some of them would have worked out fine.
Questions people actually ask
Why not just use my broker statement?
Because it reports premium received, not whether the strategy beat holding the shares. Those are different numbers and only one of them tells you if the work was worth it.
What should an options income ledger record per trade?
Ticker, strategy, strike, expiry, contracts, credit received, fees, the date opened, how it resolved, and the cost basis before and after. Anything less and you cannot reconstruct a return later.
Does OptionsKing import from my broker?
No. It has no brokerage connection of any kind, so trades are entered by you. That is slower and it is the reason there is no account linking to worry about.
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Option Alpha pricing came from Option Alpha on August 4, 2026. OptionsKing publishes this page. Nothing here is investment or tax advice. See the disclaimer.