Selling a covered call lets you earn extra cash from shares you already hold. INCOME LAB finds the contract that fits your rules, tells you when no trade qualifies, and shows afterwards whether the income strategy beat simply holding the shares. Ordinarily, turning shares into cash means selling some — a covered call pays you cash today while you keep the stock.
Systematic short-premium against stock you hold: strike selection vs basis, market-implied assignment odds on every rung, refusal when nothing meets your rules, and a graded record of every decision. Same engine as Option LAB — terms and odds QC, never a win prediction.
We evaluate the trade against your rules and the historical record — or tell you none qualifies.
Open the position and we follow it, price your available actions, and alert you when a rule fires.
Every managed position ends with a receipt: what happened, what changed, and whether — and by how much — the change helped.
Enter what you hold. We fetch the live (15 min delayed) chain and build the three strategies around your cost. When no contract satisfies a rule, we say so — not trading is a result too.
Delayed CBOE chain, ~20–50 DTE calls, OTM only. Odds shown are market-implied (N(d2) from chain IV) — labeled as such, not a forecast.
If the share price falls instead: all three keep the premium as a cushion and lower your breakeven — but none protects against the shares themselves declining; you still own the stock and its full downside.
In all three cases, lifecycle management can improve your ROI — manage-to-exit is the $10 tier.
Premiums from the delayed CBOE chain (bid side — the executable side when you sell). Assignment odds are market-implied from chain IV, not a prediction. Educational only.
A CSV with your holdings — ticker, shares, cost per share (broker exports work; extra columns are ignored). We fetch each name’s live chain and evaluate the best covered call for every position that has ≥100 shares. Parsed and evaluated entirely in your browser — the file never leaves your machine.
Most bought options expire worthless — in our calibration of 26,079 real option lifecycles, only ~2 in 10 finished profitable. But ~7 in 10 could have been sold at a profit at some point before expiry. INCOME LAB helps you avoid overpaying at entry, size the position so a losing streak can't hurt you, manage the option's life after execution, reduce avoidable loss, and catch the exit windows most buyers sleep through.
bought options finished profitable at expiration.
could have been sold at a profit before expiry — the windows most buyers sleep through.
avoid overpaying, size safely, manage the life, catch the exits.
Measured history, not a promise — early exits also cap the rare big winners, and the decision is always yours; your receipt shows both sides.
The same evaluator as Option LAB, running in your browser (your inputs never leave this page; chain data comes from your local scanner). Terms and odds QC only — not a win prediction; most long options lose.
Assessment of terms and odds — not advice, not a win prediction.
Structure and pricing check only — it judges the terms you are getting, never the outcome. Realized-vol comparison abstains in the browser; liquidity reads "unknown" when the delayed chain carries no open interest.
Unusual Whales, SpotGamma, ThinkorSwim, IBKR, Schwab, or any CSV — every contract graded and ranked, best-priced first. Parsed and evaluated entirely in your browser — the file never leaves your machine.
Status shown per strategy, honestly. A strategy ships here only when its evaluation and lifecycle layers are backed by the same graded evidence as the covered-call lane.
Get paid to wait to buy. Enter the cash you'll set aside; we surface OTM puts your cash fully secures — income, return on collateral, assignment odds and cushion, on the live chain.
The least-bad structure for your view. Pick a name and a direction — we price defined-risk verticals from the live chain and flag when a view has no robust edge (fragile = only +EV via drift), pointing you to sell premium instead of buying a long option.
The seller frame is where the decade record shows the harvest — but fills-basis honesty (ask vs bid credited) changes the picture materially. Not offered until that survives forward grading.
We monitor your position, price the available actions when conditions change, and show the developing record of every management rule. Every managed position ends with a receipt. Open a covered call from Build, or an option from Evaluate — it appears here.
In our calibration of 26,079 real option lifecycle paths (2016–2026, conservative buy-at-ask / exit-at-bid, held-out sample): only about 2 in 10 positions finished profitable at expiration — but about 7 in 10 were sellable at a profit at some point before expiry. That gap is exactly what unmonitored positions give away. A measured historical fact, not an exit rule — early exits also cut off the rare big winners; the receipt shows both sides.
Three measured calibrations, each a distinct dataset: 26,079 real option lifecycles, a 2,243-name implied-vs-realized calibration drawn from a 111M+ option-record corpus, and 777,000 simulated income paths. Twenty-plus evaluation components, each carrying its own evidence status. Machine-learning and neural models — and external-environment signals such as prediction markets and market-stress instruments — run as shadow challengers, never a validated driver until they earn promotion.
Every result goes into the record. Past refusals carry their own receipts.
Three separate purchases, each priced at what it is — no credit, deduction or bundle. Evaluate is optional; Build is required before Manage, because management watches a specific built trade. No subscriptions. No renewal you forgot about.
INCOME LAB is an education and analytics platform. We do not promise that every trade makes money. We promise to: