Options income

Cash-Secured Put Calculator

Collateral, premium, period and annualized return, breakeven, and cost basis if assigned for a cash-secured put, including what the parked cash can earn in T-bills or a money-market fund.

1 contract covers 100 shares.
Annual yield earned on the collateral while the put is open.
Annualized return on collateral
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  • Collateral requiredn/a
  • Premium collected (net of commissions)n/a
  • Return on collateral for the periodn/a
  • Annualized premium returnn/a
  • Total annualized incl. T-bill yieldn/a
  • Breakeven at expirationn/a
  • Downside cushionDistance from the stock price to breakevenn/a
  • Effective cost basis if assignedn/a

Formulas

Collateral = strike × 100 × contracts

Net premium = premium × 100 × contracts − commission × contracts

Period return = net premium ÷ collateral

Annualized = net premium per contract ÷ (strike × 100) × 365 ÷ days

Total annualized = annualized premium return + T-bill yield

Breakeven = cost basis if assigned = strike − net premium per share

Downside cushion = (stock price − breakeven) ÷ stock price

Simple (non-compounded) annualization on a 365-day year. Assumes the put is held to expiration; ignores early assignment, assignment fees, and taxes.

Dividends

Ex-Dividend Drop Estimator

Estimates the ex-day opening price using our Ex-Dividend Day Price Drop study: across 5,106 ex-dividend events in 80 S&P 500 stocks (2010–2025), shares opened lower by an average of 0.812 times the dividend (95% CI 0.762 to 0.861) before adjusting for market moves. Once the market's own move is correctly backed out, the paper finds the average drop is roughly the full dividend, so these raw ratios partly reflect the market's direction on those days.

Used to annualize the yield.
The paper sorts events into equal-count yield terciles but does not publish the cutoffs, so pick the bucket yourself using the computed yield as a guide. Sector differences were not statistically significant (ANOVA p = 0.122); yield differences were (p = 0.0019), though the paper notes the yield pattern may be partly mechanical.
Expected drop at the open
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  • Drop ratio usedn/a
  • Expected ex-day open pricen/a
  • Expected open, rangen/a
  • Theoretical full-drop pricePrior close minus the full dividendn/a
  • Shortfall vs. a full dropn/a

Formulas

Expected drop = dividend × drop ratio

Expected open = prior close − expected drop

Full-drop price = prior close − dividend

Yield = dividend × payments per year ÷ price

Drop ratio (paper) = (prior close − ex-day open) ÷ dividend

Historical average; individual events vary widely. The drop ratio's standard deviation across events was 1.83, so a single stock's open can land far from this estimate. The range reflects uncertainty in the average ratio, not the spread of individual events. Adjusted for market moves, the paper's average rises to about 1.0, the full dividend. Read the paper.

Technical analysis research

RSI Study Explorer

Interactive results from our RSI study: four Wilder RSI(14) strategies backtested across 100 U.S. stocks in 11 sectors with up to 64 years of daily data (1962–2026), 5,174 trades in total. Buy when RSI crosses below the lower threshold, sell when it crosses above the upper threshold.

Read with care. The 100-stock universe consists only of companies that survived to 2026 (delisted, bankrupt, and acquired firms are excluded), which biases win rates and average returns upward; the paper does not estimate the size of this bias, which is likely largest for long-hold strategies such as Weekly 20/80. The tests cannot separate RSI timing from the upward drift of these surviving stocks. Stock by stock, every strategy lagged buy-and-hold on an annualized basis (paired t-test p < 10⁻¹⁹ for all four), mainly because capital sat idle between signals; that comparison uses single stocks with no return on idle cash, not a portfolio or an index. These are hypothetical backtest results, not investment advice.

Strategy results

Table 1 and Table 2 of the paper. Toggle strategies and pick a metric.

Strategies to show

By sector

Tables 3 and 4. The paper publishes sector tables for the two 30/70 strategies only, and the rankings reflect today's surviving winners; for the 20/80 strategies, sector differences were not statistically significant (ANOVA p = 0.8226 daily, 0.5812 weekly).

Show sector table

Market regimes

Table 6: performance during market crises, filtered by the strategy toggles above. Some cells rest on very few trades (Weekly 20/80 had 2 trades in the 2022 bear market).

Gross returns before costs and taxes. Source: The Empirical Performance of RSI-Based Trading Strategies (luppiter Group, 2026).

Technical analysis

RSI Backtester: Test Your Own Stock

Run the paper's exact entry and exit rules on any daily price history. Upload or paste a CSV with a Date column and a Close or Adj Close column, such as a Yahoo Finance historical-data download. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.

First row must be headers. Dates as YYYY-MM-DD or MM/DD/YYYY; any row order.

Weekly uses the last close of each week ending Friday.
Trades
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Win rate
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Avg return / trade
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Avg holding (days)
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Strategy return (compounded)
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Buy-and-hold return
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Time in market
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Span (years)
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Rules (matching the paper's methodology)

RSI uses Wilder's smoothing: average gain and loss are seeded with a simple average of the first N changes, then updated as (previous × (N − 1) + current) ÷ N. The paper's implementation (an exponential average with α = 1/N) converges to the same values after a short warm-up, so the two can disagree only on signals near the start of a series.

Entry: buy at the close when RSI is below the lower threshold and the prior bar's RSI was at or above it (a downward cross). Exit: sell at the close when RSI is above the upper threshold and the prior bar's RSI was at or below it (an upward cross). One position at a time; a position still open at the end is closed at the last price and flagged.

Returns are gross (no commissions, slippage, or taxes). Buy-and-hold runs from the first to the last close of the same series; time in market is calendar days held divided by calendar days in the span.

Financial modeling

DCF Modeler Now free

A per-share discounted cash flow model with Bear, Base, and Bull scenarios, share buyback modeling, a sensitivity grid, and a Monte Carlo simulation, all in one HTML file.

Start from a company's free cash flow (total or per share) or its EPS. The modeler projects that figure forward with a year-one growth rate that decays each year, shrinks the share count by your buyback rate, discounts each year's per-share value at your discount rate (WACC), and adds a terminal value from an exit multiple on the final year.

Bear and Bull cases are offset from the Base case by adjustable growth, multiple, WACC, and buyback deltas, so you see the range at a glance and how each sits against today's price. It is a single self-contained HTML file with no external scripts: open it in any browser, online or off.

  • Metric basis: total FCF, FCF per share, or EPS, valued per share
  • Bear, Base, and Bull scenarios with adjustable offsets
  • Year-one growth with annual growth decay over a 3 to 20 year projection
  • Discount rate (WACC) and exit-multiple terminal value
  • Share buyback modeling: an annual buyback rate lowers the share count and lifts per-share value
  • Sensitivity table: a 5 × 5 grid of growth rate vs. exit multiple, shaded against the current price
  • Monte Carlo simulation: 2,000 runs randomizing growth, WACC, exit multiple, and buyback, with a histogram and 5th to 95th percentile values
  • Year-by-year projection table and a copyable step-by-step valuation equation
  • CSV export of all three scenarios and the base-case projections
  • Single HTML file; works offline