About OptionIncomeTools

Our mission

OptionIncomeTools exists to give retail options-income traders the same caliber of decision-support tools that institutional desks take for granted — live screeners, full-cycle backtesting, transparent scoring formulas, and risk-aware education — without a paywall, without a signup wall, and without filler content.

What we publish

The site spans three layers:

1. Live tools: screeners for the wheel strategy, dividend+CC stacking, and earnings-volatility plays; the Income Goal Planner; the Black-Scholes calculator; the Strike Screener; the Live Opportunities dashboard. All powered by real Polygon.io market data, refreshed every five minutes.
2. Decision tools: the Options Backtesting Engine (real historical performance), the Strategy Comparison Engine (side-by-side equity curves), the Options Income AI (natural-language strategy planner), and the Portfolio Wheel Manager (local-first position tracker).
3. Education: eight pillar guides on the major options-income strategies (covered calls, cash-secured puts, the wheel, Greeks, IV, risk management), plus per-ticker dashboards, account-size income guides, and sector × strategy playbooks.

Editorial standards

We treat every page as if a regulator might read it. Specifically:

• No specific trade recommendations. We rank candidates and explain trade-offs. We do not tell you to buy or sell anything. The disclaimer on every page reinforces this.
• No paid placements masked as editorial. Affiliate links are disclosed; broker ratings are based on functionality, not commission.
• Open math. Every formula on the site — from Black-Scholes through the Wheel Score weights to the Risk Score components — is documented on the methodology page. If you see a number you don't understand, the math is there.
• Honest yield reporting. Annualized yields are cycle-arithmetic numbers. We say so. We also explicitly note that real-world net yields typically run 40–70% of the displayed number after IV crush, assignment frequency, and slippage.
• Corrections welcomed. Email [email protected] with corrections or substantive critiques. We credit material corrections in the methodology changelog.

Editorial process

Content goes through three stages:

Drafting — pillar guides are written by an analyst with hands-on experience running the strategy. Supporting articles reference the pillar for canonical math. New tools ship with a per-feature explainer.

Review — every article is reviewed for: factual accuracy against the methodology page, citation of regulatory bodies where relevant (OCC, IRS, FINRA), and absence of trade-specific recommendation language.

Maintenance — articles carry "Last reviewed" dates and are re-checked at least quarterly. Material market or regulatory changes trigger immediate updates with a note in the changelog.

The team

Data sources

Option chains, quotes, dividends, and earnings come from Polygon.io via a Cloudflare Workers proxy. Daily price aggregates also come from Polygon. Day-over-day change deltas come from Stooq (free, reliable from CDN egress). Earnings calendar is hardcoded for the popular-ticker universe with quarterly review.

Limitations we openly admit

• The Polygon Options Starter plan provides 15-minute delayed quotes during market hours; live trading decisions should always be verified against your broker's order book.
• Implied volatility comes from Polygon's chain data; we do not recompute it. The IV-rank calculation is an approximation since we don't have a year of historical IV cached.
• Backtest pricing uses synthetic Black-Scholes from realized volatility — a strong proxy, but not a tick-by-tick replay of the actual chain.
• We model European-style options; American-style early exercise is not handled. For income-selling strategies the approximation is acceptable; for arbitrage strategies it is not.

What we don't do

• We don't sell signals.
• We don't run a trading newsletter that pumps positions.
• We don't track user trades or sell user data.
• We don't have a paywall on any tool, calculator, or article.
• We don't claim outcomes. Options trading carries substantial risk of loss.

How we sustain the site

Two revenue sources, both transparent: Google AdSense for non-intrusive display ads, and affiliate relationships with brokers and the Polygon.io data feed. We do not accept paid placement in editorial content. No broker, exchange, or asset manager pays us to write about them.

Contact + corrections

General questions, corrections, methodology suggestions: [email protected]

Legal / compliance / takedown: see our disclaimer, terms, and privacy policy.

Editorial standards: see our editorial policy.

Page last reviewed: 2026-06-11 · Methodology owner: OptionIncomeTools editorial team · Methodology changelog