Cash-secured puts on WMT
Walmart Inc. was trading at $110.64 when this page was last refreshed on August 3, 2026. 18 out-of-the-money WMT puts sat in the 0.15 to 0.25 delta band, paying $53 to $117 a contract against $10,300 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 14 11d | $106.00 | $0.52 / $0.54 | $53 | $10,600 | 16.6% | 81% | $105.47 |
| August 21 18d | $103.00 | $0.90 / $0.94 | $92 | $10,300 | 18.1% | 81% | $102.08 |
| August 28 25d | $103.00 | $1.08 / $1.18 | $113 | $10,300 | 16.0% | 80% | $101.87 |
| September 4 32d | $103.00 | $0.80 / $1.54 | $117 | $10,300 | 13.0% | 79% | $101.83 |
| September 11 39d | $101.00 | $0.15 / $1.29 | $72 | $10,100 | 6.7% | 80% | $100.28 |
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 $103.00 put expiring September 4 pays $117 and commits $10,300 in cash for 32 days, which works out to 1.1% on the money you tied up, or 13.0% annualized.
Your break-even is $101.83, 8.0% 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 WMT at $101.83 and hold it? If the answer is no, $117 is not the reason to say yes.
What the premium is priced off
At-the-money implied vol is 32%. 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 8.8% of the mid, widening to 158.3% on the worst strike here. Workable, but do not send a market order. Open interest is thin, 95 contracts at the median strike. You can get into a position like that far more easily than you can get out of it. One expiry in this ladder has almost no open interest at all (September 11), 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 $10,183, which is what you lose if WMT goes to zero. Nobody plans for zero. A 25% gap on bad news is not exotic though, and on the $103.00 strike that is roughly $1,885 of unrealized loss against $117 collected. 16 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 18.1%, on the $103.00 strike expiring August 21. It is $92 of actual cash. Over 18 days that is 0.9% 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 16.6%, 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 WMT?
Strike times 100 per contract, in full. On the $103.00 strike above that is $10,300 sitting in the account per contract, doing nothing else for 32 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 WMT cash-secured put?
Strike minus the premium per share. On the $103.00 strike expiring September 4 that is $101.83, which is 8.0% below where the stock was at the snapshot. Below that price you are down money on the position, premium included.
Is selling puts on WMT 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 18 in-band WMT puts cleared its 75 confidence bar. Read what that bar guarantees, and the disclaimer, before you treat any of this as a view.
Read this as a snapshot, not a suggestion. It is where the WMT chain stood on August 3, 2026, and every price in it has already changed.