Cash-secured puts on F
Ford Motor Company was trading at $13.39 when this page was last refreshed on September 16, 2026. 3 out-of-the-money F puts sat in the 0.15 to 0.25 delta band, paying $14 to $24 a contract against $1,250 of cash you would have to set aside per contract. None of them came back with a score.
Numbers on this page come from a snapshot taken on September 16, 2026. They are not live quotes and are not refreshed when you load the page.
| Expiry | Strike | Bid / ask | Premium | Cash secured | Annualized | Keep odds | Break-even |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| October 9 23d | $12.50 | $0.13 / $0.14 | $14 | $1,250 | 17.1% | 81% | $12.37 |
| October 23 37d | $12.50 | $0.20 / $0.27 | $24 | $1,250 | 18.6% | 78% | $12.27 |
| October 30 44d | $12.00 | $0.18 / $0.22 | $20 | $1,200 | 13.8% | 83% | $11.80 |
One row per expiration: the out-of-the-money strike closest to the middle of the delta band. The cash-secured column is the full obligation, strike times 100, because that is the capital the return has to be measured against and it is the number most screeners quietly leave out.
The capital number is the trade
Every screener quotes a cash-secured put by its premium. The premium is the small number. Selling the $12.50 put expiring October 9 pays $14 and commits $1,250 in cash for 23 days, which works out to 1.1% on the money you tied up, or 17.1% annualized.
Your break-even is $12.37, 7.6% below where the stock was trading. That is the price you would effectively be buying 100 shares at if you get assigned, and it is the only number that should decide the strike. One question, asked honestly: would you buy F at $12.37 and hold it? If the answer is no, $14 is not the reason to say yes.
What the premium is priced off
At-the-money implied vol is 34%. Rich, and richness has a reason: something in the next few weeks is expected to move this stock, and you are the one selling the insurance against it.
Can you actually get filled
Median bid-ask spread is 20.0% of the mid. That is wide. On a 60 cent contract you are giving up real money the moment you cross, and the widest strike in this ladder sits at 29.8%. Open interest runs about 259 contracts at the median strike. Enough to trade, not enough to be careless with size.
Dates that matter in this window
Earnings land inside the 45-day window. That is the one date that reliably breaks a premium-selling trade: the stock gaps, the strike you picked on a probability model turns out to have been picked on the wrong distribution, and the vol you sold collapses to reward the buyer instead of you. The engine deducts heavily for it. The stock pays about 4.5% a year, and no ex-dividend date was confirmed inside this window.
The worst case, stated properly
Max loss on this trade is $1,237, which is what you lose if F goes to zero. Nobody plans for zero. A 25% gap on bad news is not exotic though, and on the $12.50 strike that is roughly $233 of unrealized loss against $14 collected. 17 cycles of premium, in one print.
That is the picking-up-pennies critique and it describes the risk correctly. It is a bad argument against the strategy and a very good argument for position sizing, because the trade goes wrong when eight positions in the same sector gap together, not when one does.
What the annualized column hides
The best annualized number in this ladder is 18.6%, on the $12.50 strike expiring October 23. It is $24 of actual cash. Over 37 days that is 1.9% in the hand, which is the number to compare against anything else you could do with the same capital. The near expiry is close behind at 17.1%, with a lot less time for the position to go wrong.
Questions people actually ask
How much cash do you need to sell a put on F?
Strike times 100 per contract, in full. On the $12.50 strike above that is $1,250 sitting in the account per contract, doing nothing else for 23 days. A broker that lets you post less is giving you margin, which is a different trade with a different risk profile whatever the ticket calls it.
What is the break-even on a F cash-secured put?
Strike minus the premium per share. On the $12.50 strike expiring October 9 that is $12.37, which is 7.6% below where the stock was at the snapshot. Below that price you are down money on the position, premium included.
Is selling puts on F a good idea right now?
This page does not answer that, and neither does the number of strikes in the table. What the app can say is that at the last refresh not one of the 3 in-band F puts came back with a score. There is no minimum score, so a high place in the order means better than the rest of this chain, nothing more. Read how the scoring works, and the disclaimer, before you treat any of this as a view.
None of these is a pick. This is a dated snapshot of the F chain from September 16, 2026, and an option chain from last week is history, not a quote.