Cash-secured puts on XLE
Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund was trading at $64.49 when this page was last refreshed on September 16, 2026. 23 out-of-the-money XLE puts sat in the 0.15 to 0.25 delta band, paying $34 to $60 a contract against $6,100 of cash you would have to set aside per contract. 23 of them came back scored.
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 | $63.00 | $0.31 / $0.37 | $34 | $6,300 | 39.4% | 83% | $62.66 |
| September 25 9d | $62.50 | $0.49 / $0.57 | $53 | $6,250 | 34.4% | 79% | $61.97 |
| September 28 12d | $62.00 | $0.41 / $0.51 | $46 | $6,200 | 22.6% | 82% | $61.54 |
| September 30 14d | $62.00 | $0.51 / $0.61 | $56 | $6,200 | 23.6% | 80% | $61.44 |
| October 2 16d | $61.50 | $0.50 / $0.59 | $55 | $6,150 | 20.2% | 81% | $60.96 |
| October 9 23d | $61.00 | $0.56 / $0.64 | $60 | $6,100 | 15.6% | 80% | $60.40 |
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 $61.00 put expiring October 9 pays $60 and commits $6,100 in cash for 23 days, which works out to 1.0% on the money you tied up, or 15.6% annualized.
Your break-even is $60.40, 6.3% 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 XLE at $60.40 and hold it? If the answer is no, $60 is not the reason to say yes.
What the premium is priced off
28% at the money is a normal tape for XLE. The premium is fair, not generous.
Can you actually get filled
Median bid-ask spread is 17.6% 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 21.7%. Open interest runs about 224 contracts at the median strike. Enough to trade, not enough to be careless with size. 2 expiries in this ladder have almost no open interest at all (September 28, 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
XLE 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 stock pays about 2.9% a year, and no ex-dividend date was confirmed inside this window.
The worst case, stated properly
Max loss on this trade is $6,040, which is what you lose if XLE goes to zero. Nobody plans for zero. A 25% gap on bad news is not exotic though, and on the $61.00 strike that is roughly $1,203 of unrealized loss against $60 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 39.4%, on the $63.00 strike expiring September 21. It is $34 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 XLE?
Strike times 100 per contract, in full. On the $61.00 strike above that is $6,100 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 XLE cash-secured put?
Strike minus the premium per share. On the $61.00 strike expiring October 9 that is $60.40, which is 6.3% below where the stock was at the snapshot. Below that price you are down money on the position, premium included.
Is selling puts on XLE 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 23 of 23 in-band puts came back scored, and it would have ranked them and shown you the head of that list. 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.
Read this as a snapshot, not a suggestion. It is where the XLE chain stood on September 16, 2026, and every price in it has already changed.