Cash-secured puts on QQQ
Invesco QQQ Trust was trading at $697.06 when this page was last refreshed on August 3, 2026. 106 out-of-the-money QQQ puts sat in the 0.15 to 0.25 delta band, paying $252 to $354 a contract against $67,000 of cash you would have to set aside per contract. None cleared the confidence bar.
Numbers on this page come from a snapshot taken on August 3, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 10 7d | $679.00 | $2.49 / $2.55 | $252 | $67,900 | 19.4% | 80% | $676.48 |
| August 11 8d | $678.00 | $2.86 / $2.92 | $289 | $67,800 | 19.4% | 80% | $675.11 |
| August 12 9d | $676.00 | $3.10 / $3.16 | $313 | $67,600 | 18.8% | 80% | $672.87 |
| August 13 10d | $675.00 | $3.39 / $3.44 | $342 | $67,500 | 18.5% | 80% | $671.59 |
| August 14 11d | $673.00 | $3.51 / $3.57 | $354 | $67,300 | 17.4% | 80% | $669.46 |
| August 17 14d | $670.00 | $3.50 / $3.56 | $353 | $67,000 | 13.7% | 81% | $666.47 |
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 $670.00 put expiring August 17 pays $353 and commits $67,000 in cash for 14 days, which works out to 0.5% on the money you tied up, or 13.7% annualized.
Your break-even is $666.47, 4.4% 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 QQQ at $666.47 and hold it? If the answer is no, $353 is not the reason to say yes.
What the premium is priced off
22% at the money is a normal tape for QQQ. The premium is fair, not generous.
Can you actually get filled
Median bid-ask spread across these strikes is 1.9% of the mid. That is tight enough that the spread is not a real cost, which is rarer than it sounds. Open interest is thin, 89 contracts at the median strike. You can get into a position like that far more easily than you can get out of it. 2 expiries in this ladder have almost no open interest at all (August 12, August 17), and a strike nobody else holds is a strike you will be negotiating your way out of alone.
Dates that matter in this window
QQQ is a fund, so there is no earnings date to sell into. That removes the single largest gap risk a premium seller faces, and it is most of the reason funds are easier to write against than the names inside them.
The worst case, stated properly
Max loss on this trade is $66,647, which is what you lose if QQQ goes to zero. Nobody plans for zero. A 25% gap on bad news is not exotic though, and on the $670.00 strike that is roughly $14,368 of unrealized loss against $353 collected. 41 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 19.4%, on the $678.00 strike expiring August 11. It is $289 of actual cash. It annualizes well because it is an 8-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. The near expiry is close behind at 19.4%, 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 QQQ?
Strike times 100 per contract, in full. On the $670.00 strike above that is $67,000 sitting in the account per contract, doing nothing else for 14 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 QQQ cash-secured put?
Strike minus the premium per share. On the $670.00 strike expiring August 17 that is $666.47, which is 4.4% below where the stock was at the snapshot. Below that price you are down money on the position, premium included.
Is selling puts on QQQ 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 none of the 106 in-band QQQ puts cleared its 75 confidence bar. Read what that bar guarantees, and the disclaimer, before you treat any of this as a view.
Nothing above is a recommendation. It is what the QQQ chain looked like on August 3, 2026, filtered to the strikes a premium seller would look at first, and the prices have moved since you loaded this page.