Income Rolls

The counterpart to Suggestions. That page proposes trades you do not have; this one works only on what you already hold — which written call is worth buying back and rewriting, where shares are sitting uncovered, and when the answer is to do nothing.

The verdicts

Verdict	Means
SELL	Uncovered shares with a strike worth writing against them.
ROLL	A written option worth closing and rewriting — further out, further up, or both.
HOLD	The position is fine as it stands. The most common answer, and a real one.
SKIP	Nothing can be evaluated — no chain, no cost basis, nothing to write against.

The Income Rolls table: three holdings, each with a HOLD verdict, shares, uncovered count, spot price and the call currently written against them. — Three written calls, three **HOLD**s — the WHY column giving the reason rather than leaving you to infer it. Nothing to do is the usual answer, and a page that manufactured activity here would be worse than useless.

The wheel rule, and why the floor matters

Writing calls against stock has one hard constraint: never sell the shares below what you paid for them. A call written under your cost basis converts a paper loss into a realized one if it is assigned, and collecting a small premium is not a reason to accept that.

So every covered-call candidate is floored at max(spot, cost basis), and the basis that matters is the true one. Where a lot arrived by assignment, brokers commonly report it already reduced by the premium collected — a put assigned at 950 with 11.70 collected shows as 938.30 — which understates what you paid and lets the floor slip. The dashboard marks where it is using a basis you confirmed and where it is inferring one.

The same rule for a diagonal

Writing against a long call instead of shares has an equivalent floor, and it is not the long call's strike. A short written at exactly that strike breaks even on the strikes and gives back the entire premium you paid for the long — a guaranteed loss on assignment. The floor is strike + premium paid, which is the price at which the strike differential finally recoups the long leg's cost.

The annualized number, and how it lies

A 29% return on a 10-day spread annualizes to over 1000% That is arithmetically correct and it is not a rate anyone earns. It assumes you find an equally good trade every ten days, forever, with no losing cycle in between. Read annualized return as a way of comparing two trades of different lengths — which is the only thing it is good for — and never as a yield you can expect.

Two regimes of written put

A bull put spread whose legs share an expiry is a plain weekly vertical: it rolls as one thing. A weekly short put sitting under a far-dated protective put is a different animal — a protected weekly — and it has two independent decisions:

Roll the short — buy back this week's put, write the next one, leave the long alone. This is the recurring income and the reason the structure exists.
Roll the long — flagged when the protective put is getting close enough to expiry to stop protecting. It costs money, and skipping it quietly turns a defined-risk position into a naked one.

The tab marks which regime a position is in and flags when the long leg is due, because the second decision is the one that gets forgotten.

Events it warns about

Earnings inside the life of a contract you are writing means a gap the premium was not priced for, and an ex-dividend date with a written in-the-money call means early assignment is a live possibility. Both are surfaced as risk on the row. They do not change the ranking — the point is that you see them before deciding, not that the dashboard decides for you.