Leaderboard

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!

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

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

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.

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

@Romuald these revisions are a great step forward keep them coming

From a Green Tile to a Trade Decision: Inside OptionBench's Pre-Earnings Workflow Most screeners hand you a list. OptionBench hands you a decision — and then argues with you about it. Here's how that works, walking through a real setup on AMD. Start on the map The Today page opens on an Opportunity Map: where you can see one tile per backtested pre-earnings setup for the current week (or week ahead it it is the week-e,d). Each tile carries the ticker, the entry day, and two numbers: historical win rate and average return. The colour encodes the win rate: the darker the green, the more often the setup has worked across past earnings cycles. A "Trades of the week" toggle narrows the grid to the days just ahead, and the caption never lets you forget the key caveat: backtested, not realized. The darkest tile in this view is AMD — Mon, Jul 20 — Win 95% · +22.7%. Tempting. So we click it. One click into the analysis Clicking a tile doesn't dump you at the top of a table, it drops you straight onto that exact row in the scanner, ticker already in focus. For AMD, the setup is a long strangle entered eleven business days before the Aug 4 report and exited the latest about a week after, with a +10% take-profit. The top strip is the historical, backtested edge: a 95% win rate (19 of 20 cycles), a +22.7% average return, a +18.3% median, and a typical earnings move of ±7.2% versus ±4.4% implied today. On the backtest alone, this looks like one of the strongest setups on the board. The part that keeps you honest Here's where OptionBench stops cheerleading. The right-hand verdict reads "Rich entry — RV richer than 100% of past cycles here," and the cheapness panel flags elevated IV/RV at entry — crush risk, edge reduced. In plain terms: the strangle is currently more expensive than at any comparable point in its own history, so buying it now would mean overpaying for volatility, exactly how a great backtest quietly turns into a mediocre fill. One more detail to notice: the badge says "Last close · EOD." Markets are closed right now — it's Monday morning (in France), and the NYSE opens in about six hours — so every live number on the page is the last end-of-day snapshot, not a tradeable quote. The rich-entry read is real, but it's a photograph from Friday's close. The right move isn't to trade it. It's to wait for the open and see whether the morning re-prices the strangle cheaper, or confirms it's still rich. Reading the cycle charts To judge that, we drop into the cycle charts (next Figure). Three stacked panels track the trade from T-11 to T-1 (business days before earnings): the strangle's dollar value, its relative value (RV% — "is this trade expensive?"), and its implied volatility. Every faint line is one past earnings cycle; the bold black line is the average; green dots mark the cycles that hit the +10% target, red dots the ones that didn't. It's a lot to take in at once — so a single click ("unselect all," keep Average) strips it down to the essentials: the average path, the outcome dots, and a shaded band. What the shaded band means That band is the P25–P75 range — the middle 50% of past cycles at each point in the run-up. At every T-x day, we take all the historical cycles and shade from the 25th percentile up to the 75th; the dotted line running through it is the median (P50). Think of it as the setup's normal range. When today's live reading sits inside the band, the trade is priced about as usual; below it, cheaper than history; above it, richer than history. To be continued — at the open So AMD is a beautiful backtest with a currently rich entry, frozen at Friday's close. The interesting moment is only a few hours away: when the market opens, we'll watch whether the strangle cheapens back down into its normal band — and only then decide whether it's worth putting on. That's the whole idea. The map surfaces the opportunity; the analysis tells you whether today is a good day to take it. The discipline is in the gap between the two. See you at the open. Romuald - OptionBench Backtested results are historical and are not realized returns. Nothing here is investment advice. Figures: (1) Today — Opportunity Map · (2) AMD analysis header · (3) Full cycle charts · (4) Simplified view with the P25–P75 band.

@Romuald no rush I'm sure there are other more pressing issues that need your attention ... good luck with the maintenance over the weekend

Quick heads-up for anyone using or checking out OptionBench this weekend: app.optionbench.com will be in scheduled maintenance from this Friday 10th of July afternoon (France Time) through the weekend, back to normal Monday. We're doing a planned infrastructure migration on the backend — consolidating the data layer so the scanners run faster and cleaner as we grow. Nothing's broken; we'd just rather take it offline than serve half-migrated data. If you hit a maintenance page over the weekend, that's why — everything will be back Monday. If you were mid-analysis on something and want a hand once we're back up, just ping me and I'll help you pick it back up. Thanks for your patience — doing the plumbing properly now so the tool holds up as more of you come on board. — Romuald, OptionBench.com

@Romuald thanks for sharing those thoughts .... I did consider both of them before jumping in .... the richness factor did concern me somewhat and I realize there may be a reduced edge due to that .... I also looked at the other cycles and well not as good as 8 cycles they were all still acceptable in my books as an aside is there anyway to pick more than one strategy in the scanner .. . it would be nice to be able to choose straddles and strangles together as they are closely related ... thanks for the words of thanks it has been a great ride thus far in being able to play a small role in the development of OB