Cash-secured puts on MRK
Merck and Co. was trading at $144.07 when this page was last refreshed on September 16, 2026. 19 out-of-the-money MRK puts sat in the 0.15 to 0.25 delta band, paying $77 to $249 a contract against $13,500 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 25 9d | $139.00 | $0.65 / $0.88 | $77 | $13,900 | 22.3% | 79% | $138.24 |
| October 2 16d | $138.00 | $0.95 / $2.87 | $191 | $13,800 | 31.6% | 78% | $136.09 |
| October 9 23d | $137.00 | $1.22 / $1.97 | $160 | $13,700 | 18.5% | 79% | $135.41 |
| October 16 30d | $135.00 | $1.19 / $1.36 | $128 | $13,500 | 11.5% | 81% | $133.73 |
| October 23 37d | $134.00 | $1.03 / $1.98 | $151 | $13,400 | 11.1% | 80% | $132.50 |
| October 30 44d | $134.00 | $2.08 / $2.89 | $249 | $13,400 | 15.4% | 77% | $131.51 |
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 $135.00 put expiring October 16 pays $128 and commits $13,500 in cash for 30 days, which works out to 0.9% on the money you tied up, or 11.5% annualized.
Your break-even is $133.73, 7.2% 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 MRK at $133.73 and hold it? If the answer is no, $128 is not the reason to say yes.
What the premium is priced off
At-the-money implied vol sits at 27%, which is ordinary for a name this size. Nothing in the pricing is unusual, so the trade lives or dies on strike selection rather than on the vol.
Can you actually get filled
Median bid-ask spread is 47.0% of the mid, and the worst strike here is 100.5%. At those widths the quoted premium is close to fiction. Work the order, or write a different expiry. Open interest is thin, 25 contracts at the median strike. You can get into a position like that far more easily than you can get out of it. 3 expiries in this ladder have almost no open interest at all (October 9, October 23, October 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. The stock pays about 2.4% a year, and no ex-dividend date was confirmed inside this window.
The worst case, stated properly
Max loss on this trade is $13,373, which is what you lose if MRK goes to zero. Nobody plans for zero. A 25% gap on bad news is not exotic though, and on the $135.00 strike that is roughly $2,568 of unrealized loss against $128 collected. 20 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 31.6%, on the $138.00 strike expiring October 2. It is $191 of actual cash. Over 16 days that is 1.4% in the hand, which is the number to compare against anything else you could do with the same capital.
Questions people actually ask
How much cash do you need to sell a put on MRK?
Strike times 100 per contract, in full. On the $135.00 strike above that is $13,500 sitting in the account per contract, doing nothing else for 30 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 MRK cash-secured put?
Strike minus the premium per share. On the $135.00 strike expiring October 16 that is $133.73, which is 7.2% below where the stock was at the snapshot. Below that price you are down money on the position, premium included.
Is selling puts on MRK 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 19 in-band MRK 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.
Nothing above is a recommendation. It is what the MRK chain looked like on September 16, 2026, filtered to the strikes a premium seller would look at first, and the prices have moved since you loaded this page.