Cash-secured puts on META
Meta Platforms was trading at $678.91 when this page was last refreshed on September 16, 2026. 67 out-of-the-money META puts sat in the 0.15 to 0.25 delta band, paying $348 to $653 a contract against $63,500 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 21 5d | $655.00 | $3.25 / $3.70 | $348 | $65,500 | 38.7% | 80% | $651.53 |
| September 23 7d | $650.00 | $4.25 / $4.70 | $448 | $65,000 | 35.9% | 80% | $645.53 |
| September 25 9d | $645.00 | $5.15 / $5.55 | $535 | $64,500 | 33.6% | 80% | $639.65 |
| September 28 12d | $635.00 | $3.85 / $4.80 | $433 | $63,500 | 20.7% | 84% | $630.67 |
| September 30 14d | $640.00 | $6.05 / $6.65 | $635 | $64,000 | 25.9% | 79% | $633.65 |
| October 2 16d | $635.00 | $6.30 / $6.75 | $653 | $63,500 | 23.4% | 80% | $628.48 |
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 $635.00 put expiring October 2 pays $653 and commits $63,500 in cash for 16 days, which works out to 1.0% on the money you tied up, or 23.4% annualized.
Your break-even is $628.48, 7.4% 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 META at $628.48 and hold it? If the answer is no, $653 is not the reason to say yes.
What the premium is priced off
38% at the money is well above a market-average tape. You get paid more here. You get paid more here because it moves more.
Can you actually get filled
Median bid-ask spread is 10.1% of the mid, widening to 22.0% on the worst strike here. Workable, but do not send a market order. Open interest runs about 215 contracts at the median strike. Enough to trade, not enough to be careless with size. One expiry in this ladder has almost no open interest at all (September 30), and a strike nobody else holds is a strike you will be negotiating your way out of alone.
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. An ex-dividend date falls inside the window too. On the put side that cuts the other way: the drop on the ex-date is priced into the option already, and early assignment on a short put is driven by extrinsic value running out, not by the dividend.
The worst case, stated properly
Max loss on this trade is $62,848, which is what you lose if META goes to zero. Nobody plans for zero. A 25% gap on bad news is not exotic though, and on the $635.00 strike that is roughly $11,930 of unrealized loss against $653 collected. 18 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 38.7%, on the $655.00 strike expiring September 21. It is $348 of actual cash. It annualizes well because it is a 5-day contract, and annualizing a two-week trade assumes you find twenty-six more like it, at the same premium, with the same risk. You will not.
Questions people actually ask
How much cash do you need to sell a put on META?
Strike times 100 per contract, in full. On the $635.00 strike above that is $63,500 sitting in the account per contract, doing nothing else for 16 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 META cash-secured put?
Strike minus the premium per share. On the $635.00 strike expiring October 2 that is $628.48, which is 7.4% below where the stock was at the snapshot. Below that price you are down money on the position, premium included.
Is selling puts on META 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 67 in-band META 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 META chain from September 16, 2026, and an option chain from last week is history, not a quote.