Covered-call research and position management
Find covered calls worth selling, on companies worth owning.
Selling options responsibly takes real research. FITools makes the research the easy part.
The full approach, from the first screen to expiration.
Built for established, self-directed investors. FITools surfaces the data and runs the math; the decisions stay yours.
Covered calls are income on your terms: created on demand, from shares you already own, at a strike you choose. What makes them work is discipline — take measured risks, and insist on being paid fairly for every one. FITools helps you hold that line across the whole options market.
What FITools does
- 1
Screens the business.
You set the fundamental criteria; only companies that clear them move on.
- 2
Grades the contract.
Every candidate call is scored against what the trade has to beat, graded A to F, reasons shown.
- 3
Follows the position.
After you sell, the position is checked against your rules every five minutes, through expiration.
New to covered calls? The free FITools handbook teaches the strategy from the ground up.
Before · the company screen
Companies first, options second
Most screeners begin at the option chain, where a rich premium can make a shaky business look like an opportunity. FITools begins with the company. Twenty-two fundamental filters cover valuation, profitability, growth, and balance-sheet health, from return on equity and margins to debt ratios and the Altman Z-Score, a long-standing measure of financial distress risk. Only companies that clear your bar have their option chains screened at all, so the premium is only ever judged among businesses you would actually own.
At · the ranked results
A ranked list that shows its work
Then the option screen applies your contract criteria to those companies: expiration window, strike distance, liquidity floors on open interest, volume, and bid-ask spread, an implied-volatility range, and the option to sit out earnings entirely. What comes back is every covered call that cleared both stages, ranked by a single score and graded A through F.
Expand any row and FITools states its reasons in plain language: what the premium pays against the collateral, where the strike sits, what the warning flags caught.
At · the grade
A grade you can take apart
Every score starts from a comparison most screeners never make. A covered call ties up capital that could sit in Treasury bills, and it competes with running the same strategy passively on the S&P 500. FITools grades each premium on its edge over the higher of those two bars: a fat premium that fails to clear them scores nothing for income, and the bar rises when market volatility runs high.
FITools argues against trades as readily as it argues for them: flags call out thin edges, wide spreads, short expirations, and contracts where implied volatility, the movement the market has priced into the option, runs below what the stock has actually been doing. Component scores and their weights are visible on every result, so you can see what earned the grade and what held it back.
The full scoring math, component by component →After · the follow-through
What happens after you sell
Selling the call opens the position, and FITools keeps watch from there. Every open position is checked against its rules on a five-minute cycle: a profit target that says when most of the premium is already captured, an expiration window, proximity to the strike and to breakeven, a move into the money, earnings landing before expiration, and dividend-driven early assignment, the math most sellers learn the hard way. And when market data goes stale, urgent alerts wait for fresh quotes rather than firing on old ones.
A decay gauge shows how much time value each position has left. When expiration approaches, the roll view lays out candidate rolls side by side, scenario by scenario, so acting early is a choice you can weigh rather than a scramble.
FITools is research, not a brokerage: you log your trades yourself, it works alongside whatever broker you already use, and your money never moves anywhere new.
Every rule, and when each one fires →One trade, start to finish
Say you hold 100 shares of a stock at $50, in a company that cleared your screen, and the option screen surfaces a one-month call at a $52.50 strike paying $0.60. Before you commit, FITools shows you the whole trade: $60 collected against $5,000 of stock, 1.2% for that expiration period, and both endings. Under $52.50 at expiration, you keep the shares and the $60. Above it, your shares go at $52.50, and you keep the $60 plus the gain up to the strike while giving up the gain above it. That forgone upside is part of the result, which is why covered calls suit shares you would be content to part with at the strike, never shares you mean to hold no matter what the price does. The arithmetic is yours to re-run from inputs you can check, and it says nothing about what any portfolio will earn.
Who this is for, and who it isn't yet
FITools is built for the established, self-directed investor who already researches a business before buying it and wants covered calls held to the same standard. If you understand the mechanic and have hesitated to run it because judging the trades felt like guesswork, this is the tool that replaces guesswork with process. And if cash-secured puts are part of how you sell, the same screen, score, and rules cover those too.
A few readers are better served elsewhere right now:
- If you are still learning what a covered call is, learn it by hand first. The free FITools handbook walks through the mechanics, and the friction of doing it manually teaches you what the premium is paying for. The tool is for after you understand the problem.
- If you want picks to follow, this is the wrong tool. FITools surfaces premiums, strikes, volatility, and grades so you judge each trade yourself. It hands no one a list to act on blindly.
- If the cost of a premium research tool would be a meaningful expense relative to your portfolio, it is not for you yet. That is a fit answer: the tool earns its keep for investors whose holdings are large enough that better covered-call decisions clearly outweigh what it costs.
Covered calls, researched like investments.
The method comes first: what makes a call worth selling, and how the decisions get made, before any talk of joining.
See how the method works- Learn covered calls from scratch → the free FITools handbook
- Selling options more broadly, including cash-secured puts