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Thank you @Kim — and welcome to everyone who registered this week. A few of you asked what's actually inside. Fair question — the screenshots only ever show a corner of it. Here's the full picture, same platform for both paths: free with the All-services bundle for as long as you keep it, or $39.99/month at the introductory rate, grandfathered at whatever price you join at. The scale of it first, because it's the part you can't see from a screenshot. This isn't one strategy with a win rate on top. The platform models 27 distinct strategy variants on every name: Calendars — put and call, each at monthly or 1–5 weeks: 10 variants Strangles — ATM, ATM+1, ATM+2 wings Iron Flies — base, wing 1, wing 2 Double Diagonals — base, wing 1, wing 2 Long options — 40Δ and 90Δ, calls and puts Straddles and call debit spreads Few more strategies to be opened for public soon Every variant gets its own full return matrix — entry day × exit day, median historical return per path, every underlying earnings cycle preserved. Across 2,000+ symbols with backtested history, that comes to over 191 million backtested entry-to-exit outcomes sitting behind the screens — recomputed as new cycles complete, refreshed every trading day. When a tile shows you "Win 88%", the cycles behind it are one click away, with the VIX each one happened under. No summary stat without its receipts. How you actually use it, day to day: The Summary page — type a symbol, get the whole picture on one screen: next earnings date, current setup, where today's relative volatility sits against that name's own history, and the suggested structure. It's the "should I even look closer?" page. The Daily Screener — every name opening an entry window, across all variants at once, filterable by median return, win rate, strategy, weeklies, and spread. Liquidity (NBAS) is one gate among several, not the headline — probability and consistency do the ranking; the spread column just keeps the backtest honest about fills. The return matrix — the deep dive. Compare entering T-12 vs T-5, exiting before the print vs holding through it. Click any cell for the cycle-by-cycle history. Holding through the print — the matrices don't stop at T-0. The T-0 → T+1 paths show what historically happened when a position was held through the release — for every variant, every name. Whether holding through earnings has historically paid or punished on your specific setup isn't a debate; it's a column. Post-earnings outcome analysis — after each print, see how the setups you were watching actually resolved, so the review loop is built in. Peer earnings view — read HD's print against TGT and WMT before they report. Read-through weeks are half the season. Macro events calendar — FOMC, CPI, PPI [+GDP/PCE/JOBS if live] next to the earnings calendar, because some weeks the vol you're buying isn't earnings vol. And it's not just a calendar: the same backtest engine runs on macro events too — 130,000+ backtested outcomes on straddles and strangles entered around scheduled macro releases. Watchlists, favorites, and setup tracking — pin a setup, watch its pricing and expected move evolve daily through the print, review it after. Every tracked setup becomes a lesson. And it keeps moving. Check the What's New page: 8 additional features shipped in the last 4 weeks (we are not even 2 months after go-live) — the spread filter, peer earnings date overlaying on RV charts, macro events overlaying on charts...— nearly all of them because someone here asked. Lately the pace has been one to two releases a week, and the roadmap is mostly this thread's questions, ranked. If something's missing or confusing, DM @Kim or @krisbee — that's how the product gets built. Everything in the platform is historical/educational analysis, not trade recommendations or financial advice. Options trading involves substantial risk.

What a pre-earnings card looks like now Several people asked what the scanner actually shows once you open a row, so here is one from Friday — Macy's, long strangle, entry window opening at T-12. Two things I reworked this week. The entry readings now sit on a fixed scale. Cheap on the left, rich on the right, needle where this setup falls against its own history at the same point in past cycles. Position cost is a little below the median of 16 cycles; implied vol is near the bottom of the range. Before, the bar filled from the left in both cases and you had to read the label to know which direction it meant. Below that, what the market is pricing against what the stock usually does: ±12.1% implied versus a ±6.3% average earnings move. Roughly twice the usual — which matters, because this position is bought, not sold. The line worth pointing at, though, is on the setup tile. The exit rule is "first close at or above +10%", and a close is not the threshold — it is wherever the market happened to finish that day. Across the backtest history the median winner books well above the target. So a resting limit order at +10% would fill at +10% and return less than the numbers on the card. Worth knowing before you place the order. Free to look at: https://optionbench.com Not investment advice — the tool describes what setups have done historically, your broker's chain is where you check whether it fills.

New on the Daily Screener: a liquidity check on every setup @FrankTheTank recently asked me a question that's harder to answer than it sounds: "How many of these setups could I actually get filled on?" It's the right question. A screener can show you a beautiful historical edge — high win rate, strong median return — on a name whose options trade so wide that the edge exists only on paper. The backtest gets a clean theoretical price; you get the spread. Wide bid-ask markets are how a good-looking backtest quietly becomes a bad live trade, and most tools simply don't warn you. So now the screener does. Every symbol on the Daily Screener carries an NBAS value — a normalized measure of how wide its options markets are, derived from the same market data the historical numbers are built on. Lower = tighter markets = the numbers on your screen are closer to something you can actually have. You don't need to know anything about how it's computed to use it: it's color-coded right in the table — green is tight, amber and orange are questionable, red is wide, and a "—" means the name had no measurable liquid options at all, which is its own answer. How to use it Next to the Return and Win % filters there's a new Spread (NBAS) dropdown. Select the tightest bucket and the board shrinks to names where the market is liquid enough that the historical numbers deserve your attention. When a spread filter is active, unknown-liquidity names are excluded too — if liquidity can't be measured, that's a caution flag, not a free pass. The honest part Building this taught me something I wasn't fully expecting, and I'd rather tell you than have you discover it the hard way: once you screen for liquidity honestly, a lot of the board falls away. Far more names than you'd guess carry markets too wide to trade well — including some with genuinely impressive historical stats. That's not a flaw in the backtests; it's the difference between an edge that existed in the data and an edge you can collect. This column exists to keep those two things from being confused. Two caveats so nobody over-reads the number: It's a relative ranking, not a fill forecast. The measurement comes from end-of-day data, and closing markets run wider than what you'll typically see intraday on liquid names. Use it to compare names against each other and against the backtest's own pricing basis — not as a prediction of your fill cost tomorrow morning. A tight spread is a prerequisite, not a signal. Green doesn't make a setup good — it just means the market will let you have it near a fair price. It filters out false edges; it doesn't create real ones. Before shipping, the values were cross-checked against independent live quotes on several names and lined up well. The number measures what it claims to measure. That screenshot is the whole reason this feature exists: a setup with strong historical stats that you should almost certainly never touch, because the market for it barely exists. Before this column, that row looked identical to a real opportunity. My updated morning routine Open the Daily Screener → set the Spread filter to the tightest bucket → then start reading win rates and medians. Liquidity first, edge second. An edge you can't collect isn't an edge, so there's no point evaluating it. This feature shipped because someone here asked for it — which is how most of the platform gets built. Curious about the methodology details? They're documented inside the app for members. And if there's a number you wish the screener showed, or a question you keep answering by hand, say so here or DM me. The fastest way to get a feature is to complain about its absence. Thanks to @FrankTheTank @Bhavan1986 for sparking the idea & and to my teammates @Kim @Yowster @TrustyJules for helping shape the app! How to access it Already using EarningsStudy? The Daily Screener is now in your sidebar — just sign in and open it. Not signed up yet? Register at https://earningsstudy.com/ with the same email you use on SteadyOptions, and you'll have it alongside the rest of the core platform. This is exactly the kind of thing we set out to do with this partnership: take the tools that were once behind an extra tier and put them in the hands of the whole community. More to come. — The SteadyOptions Team SO members on the ALL bundle: full core access to EarningsStudy is free through the partnership. Everything above is historical/educational analysis, not a trade recommendation or financial advice. Options trading involves substantial risk. Liquidity measurements are from end-of-day data and will differ from intraday markets.

Anchor Trades First half of 2026 Summary: Anchor model portfolio was up 12.5% in first half of 2026 vs. 9.6% return of S&P 500. Since inception in 2019 Anchor model portfolio is up 345.3% vs. 199.2% return of S&P 500. Since the end of 2022 when both Anchor and S&P 500 were down, Anchor is up 150.3% vs. 95.2% return of S&P 500. Members who canceled in 2022 based on one negative year, all I can say is: Anchor continues crashing the S&P 500 year after year. Thank you again @cwelsh for an amazing management of the strategy! And congrats to our members!

He's probably in need of a break from all my questions 😉

When two engines disagree, and why that's the reassuring case A worked example from today's scan — not a trade suggestion, a look at how the pieces fit together. The ETF engine surfaced a QQQ bull call spread, 765/775, November expiry, $2.86 debit. It reads 82% probability of profit, $0.43 expected P&L, 15% expected return on capital at risk. The interesting part is what happens next. Push the same position into Trade Doctor and the numbers change: 76% POP, +$0.20 expected. Lower on both counts. That looks like two tools contradicting each other. It isn't, and the difference is the whole point. The engine simulates at realised volatility. It asks what happens if the underlying behaves the way it has actually been behaving. Trade Doctor reprices live at implied volatility — what the market is charging for that risk today. Implied normally sits above realised; that gap is the volatility risk premium, and it's why the second reading is the more conservative of the two. So a lower POP in Trade Doctor is expected. What you're checking is not whether the numbers match — they shouldn't — but whether the position survives the harsher assumption. Here it does: expected P&L stays positive at implied vol, 7% of capital at risk. On a debit position that isn't automatic. Plenty of setups screen well on the engine and collapse to zero expectancy once you price them at implied. Two other things the cross-check surfaces that the card alone doesn't. Both legs quote inside a 2% bid/ask spread, so friction won't eat the edge — on a $2.86 debit that matters. And the validation checklist flags five macro prints inside the trade window, including Core PCE at T-9. Everything else runs green; that one doesn't. What I'd take from it. The engine tells you a structure looks good. Trade Doctor tells you whether it still looks good when the market's own pricing is the assumption. Agreement between them isn't confirmation that a trade will work — nothing is — but disagreement in the wrong direction is a reason to stop, and that's worth thirty seconds before committing capital. For the record, this one is a directional bull bet: break-even at 767.86 with QQQ at 711. Both tools are part of OptionBench — the scanners surface the structures, Trade Doctor is the execution check you run before committing. Free 7-day trial if you want to run this cross-check on your own tickers: optionbench.com

The right principle, and one the scanner tries to enforce rather than leave to memory. Every pre-earnings row carries a confirmation flag: when the provider hasn't marked the report time as confirmed by the company, the card shows an amber "unconfirmed" chip rather than presenting the date as settled. M has been flagged that way throughout. Straight about the current state though: the card still shows September 2. Macy's put out the September 10 confirmation an hour ago and my calendar feed refreshes each morning, so the corrected date lands tomorrow at the earliest. The chip says don't trust this date, which is right, but the date itself is stale until the provider catches up. I'm watching how long that takes. Every cycle in the sample knew its date; the live position doesn't. No amount of better data closes that asymmetry, and it belongs in the trader's head rather than in a win rate. On the narrow exceptions — cheap calendars, far-dated diagonals — those cards now show the executable debit next to the mid and the spread on each leg, after Yowster flagged the gap. If someone's taking date risk deliberately for cheap relative value, they should at least see what the fill really costs first.

What a Monday morning looks like on OptionBench Someone asked what the workflow actually feels like rather than what the features are. Easiest way to answer is to walk through this morning. You land on Today. No search, no setup — the Opportunity Map is already there, showing what's in its entry window. One radio button switches between setups opening today and setups opening this week. Tiles are shaded by win rate, and each one carries the ticker, the entry date and the historical return. Markets are still closed as I write this, and the card says so — pre-earnings scanned this morning at 09:11, pre-events still on Friday's data. That's deliberate: you should always know which session you're looking at. Macy's caught my eye, so I clicked the tile and the row opened. The top strip is the backtested edge: win rate over 16 cycles, average and median return, the size of the move this name usually makes on earnings, and the exact rule the statistics were measured under — Δ±0.25, one week out, exit on the first close at or above +10%. Underneath, two things worth separating. On the left, the position as it prices right now — strikes, debit, and the fact that it's 100% extrinsic, which means it needs a move or a vol bid or theta gets it. On the right, whether that entry is expensive: cost cheaper than 75% of past cycles at this same point, implied vol at the bottom of its own range. Both needles sit left of the median, which is the reading you want. Below that, what the market is pricing against what the stock usually does: ±12.1% implied versus a ±6.3% average earnings move. Nearly twice the usual — which matters when you're buying. The playbook is four steps, collapsed by default. Timing, execution, what the trade is actually buying, and how it exits. The third one is the part most people get wrong: the position closes before the announcement, so the earnings move never enters the result. You're buying the ramp in implied volatility, not the gap. And the history. Every past cycle, value and relative value, with the current cycle overlaid. Green dots hit the target, red didn't. It gets busy fast, so you can strip it to the average band and read the shape instead. That's the whole loop: land, scan, open one row, decide. Free to look at — https://optionbench.com Not investment advice. The tool describes what setups have done historically; your broker's chain is where you check what actually fills.

Here is another cool feature. Say you consider NVDA calendar, and you want to see how it performed in the past. It is one click away:

We see your account. Next steps, please check your email.

thanks @Romuald I need to spend more time poking around the pre-event screener and this will help - just not comfortable with it yet to make an informed decision

Good question, and it's two separate things: one is a deliberate decision, one is a gap. The deliberate part. On earnings I show a third line in the entry block: the ATM straddle against the stock's average past earnings move. I measured it on events yesterday and it doesn't transfer. Across the nine live event combos, that ratio runs 3× to 7×, against a 1.72 median on earnings. The reason isn't calendar randomness, it's that a one-week straddle prices a full week of ordinary sessions, and on earnings the gap dominates that price while an ISM PMI moves GLD about 1.1%. So the same number means something completely different, and published with the earnings thresholds it would read "expensive" on every line, permanently. It's absent rather than wrong. The honest version would be a self-referential one — "event premium richer than X% of past cycles here", same grammar as the two lines above it. That needs the ATM straddle history per cycle, which I don't store yet. It's on the list. The gap. You're right that the implied move is missing from the tile itself. On pre-earnings the move tile shows "Current implied move ±X%" alongside the historical average; on pre-events it only shows the historical. That's an oversight rather than a choice, and it's the cheaper of the two to fix. Thanks for spotting it, the tile and the block are different questions and I'd conflated them.

@Romuald nice will add GLD to my to do list DOCU is already there

Today's entry windows Three names open an entry window today on the scanner. My filters: win rate ≥ 70%, positive average return, at least 20 earnings cycles of history, at least 2 years on events, and liquidity B or better. The 20-cycle floor matters more than the win rate itself. A 100% win rate on four cycles tells you nothing, and my own scanner flags those rather than showing them off. But everything above is backtested history : win rate and average return across past cycles. It says nothing about whether today's entry is priced well or not. That part only exists once the options data comes in, roughly half an hour after the open, and it's the part that decides the trade. What I'd look at on each card once quotes are live: — Entry cost against its own history. Am I buying early or late in the volatility ramp? — Entry IV against its own history. How much ramp is left to build? — Earnings premium. The ATM straddle against what the stock has actually delivered across past reports. This is the only one whose denominator is something real. Those three can disagree, and the disagreement is usually the interesting bit. A setup can read cheap against its own history while still pricing more move than the name typically produces. Yesterday's example: three earnings names cleared the same filters and all three came back rich on cost, IV and premium at once. Good history, wrong price. I didn't take any of them. The reasoning behind those three readings is here if it's useful: https://optionbench.com/blog/expensive-compared-to-what Happy to answer methodology questions — those are the ones I enjoy. Romuald - optionbench.com

A blog, and what's in it I've added a blog to my site optionbench.com — mostly write-ups of things I had to measure while building the scanners, rather than marketing pieces. The latest one came directly out of a conversation here. Yowster noticed that on the scatter charts, most cycles reaching the P&L target do so within the first week. I ran it across all 46,717 completed backtest cycles: he's right, median day 3, 87.5% within seven sessions. But the raw count would look like that even if nothing real were happening — a cycle that hits on day 3 leaves the pool. The proper test is the hazard rate among positions still alive, and that one does decay, from 10.2% on day one to about 6% from day eight. The part I didn't expect: there's no time stop worth using. Cutting a position that hasn't worked by day seven saves 0.4 points versus holding it. The loss is already there by the time you can see it isn't working. https://optionbench.com/blog/winners-arrive-early Two earlier ones on what "expensive" means for a pre-earnings entry, and why comparing a straddle to its own history isn't the same as comparing it to what the stock actually delivers. For anyone who wants to look at the tool itself, the first seven days are free at optionbench.com. Happy to answer methodology questions here: in fact, those are the ones I enjoy Happy trading, Romuald

Thanks @krisbee for adding the macro events to the charts. One thing to note, and it's an obvious thing but deserves to be noted - the macro events are for this cycle only, the prior cycles have no such ties to those event on a given T-x day.

Macro events are now drawn on the charts themselves — CPI, PPI, FOMC, JOBS, GDP, PCE Quick feature note, because this one changes how the charts read. You've had the macro events calendar next to the earnings calendar in the app for a while — FOMC, CPI, PPI, JOBS, GDP, PCE, laid out against the reporting slate. As of this week, those same events are also marked directly on the strategy charts: straddle, strangle, calendar, and long options pages all now show a marker on the exact trading day each macro event lands, both on the days already traded this cycle and on the days still ahead of the print. Why I wanted this on the chart and not just on a separate calendar page: 1. It explains the bumps you're already looking at. When the RV line kinks up mid-cycle, the first question should always be "was that earnings drift, or did CPI print that morning?" Before, answering that meant flipping between the chart and the calendar and counting days. Now the answer is sitting on the chart at the exact T-day it happened. 2. IV builds into known events — and your entry day might be one of them. Options premium tends to firm up going into a scheduled macro release and deflate after it passes. That means a position entered at T-5 the day before CPI is not the same instrument as one entered at T-5 the day after — even at the same distance from earnings. Part of what you're paying (or collecting) is macro vol, not earnings vol. Seeing the marker next to your intended entry day makes that visible before you commit, not after. 3. Event-on-event risk stops being a surprise. The screenshot below is [NVDA] — note [PCE] landing [right against T-0]. An earnings print with a major macro release stacked next to it is a different bet than a clean print: two catalysts, one position. That's exactly the kind of thing that's obvious on a chart and easy to miss on a list. 4. The days ahead are marked too, not just history. The chart shows the remaining trading days into the print with upcoming events already flagged — so if you're planning an entry at [T-x] and there's a [FOMC] marker two days before it, you can decide on purpose whether you want to be positioned through that release or enter after the dust settles. Usual caveat, because I'd rather over-say it: these markers are context, not signals. Nothing about a CPI flag tells you which way vol resolves. What it does is make sure that when you're reading a median path across [N] historical cycles, you know which of those days were carrying a second event — and whether your planned path is carrying one now. This came out of my own annoyance flipping between pages during CPI week — if there's an event type you'd want added, or you'd rather be able to toggle the markers off, say so here. That's how most of these features get built.

No, I wasn't aware of their new structure.

First execution report from a subscriber Canuck Dave traded a pre-earnings strangle off the scanner this week and filled at +18% on the open. That's the first live execution report I've had since launch, and it's worth more to me than any backtest figure I could post — so thanks to him for sharing it, and for letting me quote it. It also taught me something. The setup carries a +10% take-profit, but the position gapped through it overnight, so a limit order filled well above the target. That's a real execution path the backtest doesn't distinguish from an intraday touch, and I'm looking at how to model both properly. The part I want to be careful about. He mentioned going again because the next setup reads "cheap". I'd rather say that the cheapness gauge is not necessarily a green light. It tells you where today's entry sits against past entries at the same point in the cycle. That shifts the odds across many cycles — it does not pick the next one. For example, a cheap entry on a setup with four cycles of history isn't a bargain. An expensive entry on one with twenty well-behaved cycles can still be worth taking. Read it next to cycle count and the earnings-move tile, not on its own. The same applies to the win rate. 88% over 24 cycles means three of them lost, and nothing on the card tells you which three you're about to take. None of that makes the tool less useful. It just means it does something narrower than "find winners" — it tells you what a trade is worth under stated assumptions, and where the numbers disagree with your intuition. That's the whole product. Romuald https://www.optionbench.com/ The blog is now live on optionbench.com. First piece is Expensive Isn't a Veto — about a setup my own entry gauges told me to skip, which then returned 42%, and what I think that actually means. It's the long version of the point above. https://optionbench.com/blog/expensive-isnt-a-veto

Thanks @Romuald for all your work pulling this together. I appreciated the opportunity to be a beta tester and in a small way a contributor to the shipped product. Looking forward to my first annual subscription and many more after that. Dave is

Romuald, Sorry to keep sending messages to you. In the "Today's Briefing" page, it would be better (from my perspective), if you move the: "Lower win rate .........Higher win rate" to the top of the "Opportunity Map" Sarang

OptionBench is live! The beta is over. Two months, seventeen testers, a lot of pointed feedback and several improvements. Thank you for that. What you get Nine tools, one subscription: • Today — daily opportunity map, ranked by historical edge • Weeks — every entry date from every scanner in one calendar • IV Scanner — where options are unusually rich or cheap versus their own history • Pre-Earnings and Pre-Events ETF — backtested win rates, average returns, and per-cycle dispersion on FOMC, CPI, NFP, ISM, PCE and earnings • Best OS ETF — option structures across 26 liquid ETFs, with the payoff and key figures laid out • Ticker-Options Ideas — pick a ticker, get what currently makes sense on it • Trade Doctor — any multi-leg position, fully diagnosed: POP, expected P&L at implied and realised vol, loss profile, liquidity • Forecast by Options — the probability distribution the market is pricing right now, straight from the chain Pricing $49/month, or $529/year — $44/month if you pay annually. 7-day free trial, cancel any time during it. Discord Every subscription includes the private server. Methodology questions, scanner discussion, bug reports, and a direct line to me. It's also where I post what I'm working on before it ships. And this is the part I mean Tell me what's missing. Every meaningful change over the last two months came from someone here saying "this is confusing" or "why isn't there a…". The intraday timing tool, the expiration fix, the calendar filters — none of that was on my roadmap. Your roadmap is better than mine. https://www.optionbench.com/ Welcome!

@Romuald looks like we have a similar issue in CSCO ... let's see if it goes "on sale" next week

Update — at the open Markets opened, and here's AMD live: the strangle re-priced from $38.69 to $37.79, AMD gapped up to $512, and entry IV eased from ~87% to 84.6%. Marginally cheaper — but the verdict didn't budge: still "Rich entry," still richer than 100% of past cycles, still flagged for crush risk. On the charts, the live-value diamonds sit at the very top of every panel — value, relative value, and IV. Translation: the setup got a little bit cheaper, not cheap. It never dropped into its normal P25–P75 band, so the disciplined read is unchanged. Personnally I would pass, and let the backtest stay a backtest for this cycle. That's the tool doing its job: a 95% historical win rate is only worth having if you don't overpay to get in, from my POV. Romuald - OptionBench