Building a covered call screener
A covered call screen turns a few hundred option chains into a shortlist you can actually read. The filters that matter are liquidity, a delta band, and a hard veto on events inside the expiry window. Ranking by premium is not a filter, and on this run it would have handed you the four worst candidates on the list.
So here is a real funnel, with the count after every step.
The run
Tuesday March 3. Sixty liquid optionable US names, the April 17 monthly expiry, 45 days out, call side only. 812 listed contracts across the sixty chains.
| Filter | Left | Dropped |
|---|---|---|
| All April 17 calls, 60 names | 812 | |
| Delta between 0.15 and 0.35 | 147 | 665 |
| Open interest at least 500 | 96 | 51 |
| Traded at least 25 contracts today | 74 | 22 |
| Spread no wider than 15% of the mid | 41 | 33 |
| Mid at least $0.30 | 33 | 8 |
| Annualized static return at least 8% | 19 | 14 |
| No earnings print before expiry | 7 | 12 |
| No ex-dividend problem in the window | 6 | 1 |
| Best contract per ticker | 4 | 2 |
Four contracts out of 812. Read the middle column top to bottom and the shape of the problem is obvious.
The two filters doing nearly all the work
The delta band drops 665 of 812. That is not really a filter, it is the definition of the trade. Everything above 0.35 delta is a strike you have effectively agreed to be assigned on, and everything below 0.15 pays too little to be worth the commission. Set the band once, by how much upside you are willing to sell, and stop touching it.
Liquidity drops another 106. Open interest, then today's volume, then the spread, cutting 147 down to 41. Two thirds of the contracts that were the right distance out of the money were untradeable, and that ratio is not unusual. The thresholds and what each one catches are a page of their own.
Between them, those two ideas take 812 to 41. Everything after that is refinement.
The filter that costs you nothing
The return floor. Requiring at least 8 percent annualized static return dropped 33 to 19, and every one of those 14 had already been priced fairly. They were not bad trades. They were small ones.
Keep the floor anyway, and keep it low. Its job is to stop you selling a $0.31 credit against $5,000 of stock and calling it income. Its job is not to find you the fat premiums, because it cannot: raise the floor and you are not selecting for better trades, you are selecting for riskier stocks.
The line that earns its place
Look at the earnings row again. 19 candidates went in and 7 came out.
Twelve of the nineteen highest-yielding contracts on the whole screen had an earnings print inside the expiry window. Not a coincidence and not bad luck. High annualized return over a 45-day window is mostly the option market pricing a scheduled event, and if you rank by premium you are ranking by event risk with extra steps.
The screen's top-ranked contract before that filter was a $15 call on a $13.40 stock at 62 percent implied volatility, paying $61 for 37.1 percent annualized. Reprice the same contract at the 44 percent volatility it carries when no print is in the window and it is worth $31. Half the premium was the earnings date. The full veto logic, plus the ex-dividend half that almost never fires, is next door.
What came out
| Contract | Stock | IV | Delta | Credit | Annualized |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CSCO $64 call | $58.40 | 28% | 0.203 | $62 | 8.6% |
| VZ $47 call | $43.20 | 24% | 0.185 | $35 | 6.6% |
| XOM $130 call | $118.60 | 26% | 0.183 | $104 | 7.1% |
| DAL $57.50 call | $52.30 | 34% | 0.245 | $85 | 13.3% |
Six to thirteen percent annualized. That is what a covered call screen honestly returns on liquid names in an ordinary tape, and it is a long way from the numbers in the advertising. The DAL contract pays double the VZ one because it carries 34 percent volatility against 24, which is the market saying it is twice as likely to hurt you. Nobody is giving anything away.
Filters that sound good and are not
An IV rank threshold. "Only sell when IV rank is above 50" fails on single names with quarterly earnings, where the number mostly measures how many days until the next print. You would be filtering for the thing you just vetoed.
Ranking by premium, or by annualized return. Both rank by risk. Use them to sort the survivors, never to select them.
Technical filters. Above the 50-day moving average, RSI under 70, and the rest. Add one and your screen returns fewer results, which feels like progress. Nothing on this page can tell you whether the ones it removed were worse, and neither can anybody selling you the filter.
A dividend yield floor. Tempting, because a dividend adds return. It also adds an ex-date to the window and correlates with the sectors already dominating a covered call list.
The step no screen performs
Four contracts is not four trades. It is a reading list.
A screen sorts by things it can measure, and the two questions that decide a covered call are not among them: do you want to own this stock for the next 45 days, and can you afford 100 shares of it without wrecking your position sizing. The checks worth running by hand on a shortlist come after the machine has done its part.
OptionsKing scores every candidate strike on a deterministic 0 to 100 scale, blends that score with the return on the capital the trade ties up, and shows you the highest-ranked handful. There is no minimum score. How it works covers what the ranking does and does not tell you.
Questions people actually ask
What filters should a covered call screener use?
A delta band for how much upside you are willing to sell, liquidity thresholds on open interest, volume and spread, a low floor on annualized return, and a hard veto on earnings inside the expiry window. On a worked run those took 812 contracts down to 4.
Should I rank covered call candidates by premium?
Only after filtering, never instead of it. Premium ranks by risk: on the worked screen, 12 of the 19 highest-yielding contracts had an earnings print inside the window, and the top-ranked one had half its premium coming from that single date.
What annualized return should a covered call screen require?
Something low, around 8 percent, and treat it as a floor rather than a target. Its job is to remove trades too small to be worth the commission. Raising the floor does not find better candidates, it selects more volatile stocks.
How many candidates should a screen return?
Few. A run over 60 names for one expiry produced four, and that is a healthy number for a shortlist you intend to check by hand. A screen returning forty results is not filtering, and one returning zero is telling you something real about the tape.
Sources
Rules and thresholds above were checked against these documents on August 4, 2026. Exchange and broker rules change. Confirm anything you are about to act on with your own broker.
Keep reading
Do the math on your own trade
Every price in this article is an illustrative worked example, not a quote. Read Screening and probability for the rest of the series, and the disclaimer before you act on any of it. Selling options carries real risk of loss, and the loss can be far larger than the premium you collected.