Covered call spreadsheet vs an app

A spreadsheet is free, transparent and completely under your control, and for tracking a handful of covered calls it is genuinely hard to beat. It falls apart on two jobs: pulling a live option chain, and getting the cost basis right after assignment. Here is where the line sits.

Most people who sell covered calls start in a spreadsheet. That is not a mistake to be corrected. It is usually the right first tool and a fair number of people should stay there.

What the spreadsheet is actually good at

Every formula is visible. You typed it, so you trust it, and when a number looks wrong you can chase it back to the cell that produced it. No subscription, no account, no company that might change the product or go away. If you want to track premium collected per ticker per month against your own cost basis, twenty minutes of setup gets you something no app will match for fit, because it fits you specifically.

It also survives. A sheet you built in 2019 still opens.

Where it breaks

• Live chain data. There is no reliable free way to pull an options chain into a sheet. Broker add-ins exist, paid APIs exist, and the free scraping workarounds break silently, which means you find out when you have been pricing off a stale bid for three weeks.
• Screening. A sheet computes the trade you already picked. It will not walk 40 strikes across 6 expiries and tell you which two are worth a look, and building something that does is a project, not an afternoon.
• Liquidity checks. Almost nobody's sheet models the spread they will actually cross or the open interest at the strike. That is where a good-looking annualized yield quietly becomes a mediocre one.
• Assignment. Cost basis after a call gets assigned, then a put, then shares get put to you again, is fiddly arithmetic that people get wrong by hand, and getting it wrong compounds through every later number.

The honest recommendation

Keep the spreadsheet. Seriously. If it is doing the job, an app that does the same job with less transparency is not an upgrade, and the ledger in your sheet is yours in a way nothing hosted ever is.

Bring in a tool at the point where the work stops being arithmetic and starts being search. Picking one strike is arithmetic and a sheet is fine. Picking the best strike out of 240 candidates across your watchlist, while checking each one for a spread you can live with and an earnings date that is not lurking, is search, and it is boring enough that people skip it and go with the highest number instead.

That is the whole pitch. The calculators here do the arithmetic for free with no account. The app does the search, applies a bar of 75 by default that cannot go below 60, and keeps the record of what came of it. How it works explains what that bar guarantees.

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

Related calculators

• Covered call calculator premium, break-even, static and if-called return, annualized.
• Cash-secured put calculator capital tied up, break-even, return on that capital.
• Wheel strategy calculator a full cycle, put entry through covered call exit.
• Assignment probability calculator delta to keep-odds, with the caveat that matters.