The guide
Learn the few ideas you need before the scanner makes sense.
If you are new to options, do not browse this like a library yet. Follow the short path below first. After that, the market signals, trade cards, and charts have somewhere to land.
New to options?
Read these four in order.
This path gives you the minimum vocabulary before you inspect a trade idea. It is deliberately small: contract, chain, chance, position size.
Before the scanner
You are ready to study a scanner result when you can answer:
- What is the most I can lose?
- What has to happen for this to work?
- When would I close it, even if I am wrong?
Full library
Go deeper when you know what you are looking for.
Foundations
Start here. The vocabulary, the math, and the few rules that survive every market.
What options actually are, in money terms
Forget the Greek letters for a minute. Options are agreements about a price and a date. That is the whole game.
Why we sell options more than we buy them
Insurance companies do not buy insurance. There is a reason for that, and it is the same reason most of the trades in this app are credit trades.
The win-chance number, and how it can fool you
The app estimates how often a trade may win. That number helps, but only when you read it beside max profit and max loss.
Risk first, reward second: how I size every position
The traders who blow up are almost never wrong about direction. They are wrong about size. Here is the rule I use on every single trade.
Reading an options chain without panicking
The chain looks like a wall of numbers. It is actually four columns of useful information and a lot of decoration.
The five mistakes that wipe out new options traders
I have watched the same five errors end accounts for two decades. Here is the list, with what to do instead.
Reading the Greeks without panic
Delta, theta, vega, gamma. Four numbers, four jobs. None of them require math beyond fifth grade once you see what they actually answer.
Strategy thinking
The trade shapes that show up in the scanner, explained one by one.
Vertical spreads: training wheels with teeth
The first multi-leg trade most pros teach. Defined risk, defined reward, defined direction. Three knobs, no surprises.
Iron condors and why they fail in trends
The most popular sideways-market trade. Magnificent in chop, brutal in trends. Knowing the difference is the whole job.
Broken-wing butterflies: the trade I run most often
A 1×2×1 structure with one wing wider than the other. Tuned right, it collects a credit and keeps the main risk clearly defined.
Jade lizards: getting paid to be slightly bullish
A short put plus a short call spread, sized so the credit beats the call spread width. Zero upside risk by construction. The trade I run when IV is high and I lean bullish.
PMCC: the poor man's covered call, explained without the swagger
Buy a deep ITM long-dated call. Sell short calls against it. Same directional exposure as a covered call, fraction of the capital. Used carelessly, it bleeds.
Zero-cost collars: protecting a stock you can't sell
Sometimes you cannot sell: tax reasons, insider lockup, or a long-term plan. The collar is built for that situation: downside protection in exchange for capped upside.
When to close a winner
The hardest decision in options is closing a trade that is going your way. Here is the rule I use.
Reading the market
How to read expensive options, event pricing, put/call imbalances, and earnings.
IV rank in plain English, and what to do at 80+
IV rank tells you whether options are expensive or cheap relative to the past year. The number itself is easy. Knowing what to do with it is the work.
Volatility skew: when the market is paying you to take the unpopular side
When puts are pricier than calls, the market is paying for protection. When calls are pricier than puts, it is chasing a squeeze. Both situations have specific trades.
Term structure inversion: the regime signal nobody talks about
When near-term IV spikes above long-term IV, the market is telling you something specific. Knowing what shifts what trades you should be running.
Earnings: the one event where I close, not open
Most events I trade through. Earnings is different. The math of the IV crush makes guessing direction a worse bet than just sitting out.
Sideways markets: the hidden golden age for option sellers
Stocks chop sideways more than they trend. Most retail traders hate that. Premium sellers love it. Here is how to set up.
Gamma neutrality for portfolio hedgers
When you have a real book to hedge, delta-flat is not enough. You also need to think about how delta itself moves. That is gamma.
Beta-weighted delta, explained
Adding deltas across different stocks is misleading. Beta-weighting fixes the apples-to-oranges problem.
Managing a book
What to do with positions you already hold, one decision at a time.
Selling your first covered call
You own 100 shares. You are not selling calls against them. You are leaving 8 to 15% annualized on the table. Here is how to fix that this week.
How I decide whether to roll
A covered call is creeping into the money. Do you let it get assigned, close it, or roll it out? The answer is mechanical once you know the math.
Managing assignment risk
Assignment is the moment a short option becomes a stock position. Knowing when it can happen, and what to do, is non-negotiable.
From the founder
Notes from Jem on why this app exists and how to get the most from it.
Why I built Asymmetric
I am not a quant. I am not a market maker. I am someone who tried to learn options trading the normal way, lost money, and decided to build the tool I wished had existed.
How to use this app, in five minutes
A short walkthrough from someone who built it. Open it on your phone, follow along, get the hang of where everything lives.
The trade that started this idea
A short story about an iron condor on Tesla, a frozen index, and the realization that retail tools were not telling me what I actually needed to know.