The Wheel Is Simple and Running It Is Not
The wheel is the oldest income loop in options. You hold a hundred shares, sell a call against them, and either keep the premium when it expires or sell the shares when it is called away; then you sell a cash-secured put, keep that premium or buy the shares back on assignment, and start over. Every step is easy. What wears people out is doing every step on time, on every stock, at a strike that makes sense for the stock that week, and remembering what the shares cost when the next call is due.
Strikeline runs that loop for you. You start it from a position, swiping a row on Positions for any optionable stock you hold at least a hundred shares of, and from then on the server picks the contracts, sends the orders, books the expiries and assignments, keeps the cash for the next put aside, and tells you what it did.
You See the Backtest Before You Approve Anything
Opening the wheel on a stock runs it on roughly three years of that stock's daily history, and the report puts the wheel's total and annualized return beside simply holding the shares, the worst drop each one suffered along the way, and the premium the wheel kept after buy-backs and costs. When the wheel trailed holding the shares, the report says so. The simulation prices options with Black-Scholes at an implied volatility of 1.15 times the stock's realized 20-day volatility, charges 5% slippage on every premium plus $0.65 a contract, and uses the rule-based strikes, so the live wheel, which lets the AI choose among the candidates, is measured against a plain baseline. A stock with less than about six months of usable history gets no backtest and cannot be wheeled.
You approve one wheel per stock, from 1 to 20 contracts, up to the shares you hold divided by a hundred, and the approval has to follow a backtest no more than a week old. On a live account the setup sheet asks you to confirm in so many words that orders will be placed with real money without asking you each time.
The Strikes Stay Inside Bands You Can Read
Every contract expires 30 to 45 days out. A call sits between 2% and 10% above the last close with a delta from 0.20 to 0.35, and it is never written below what the shares cost you unless the premium already collected on them covers the gap, and then by no more than 3%. When the shares cost more than 10% above the price, the call is written from that cost floor up to 5% above it instead, with a delta up to 0.35. A put sits between 2% and 10% below the close with a delta from 0.15 to 0.30. Contracts without a real two-sided market are dropped before the AI sees the list.
Inside those bands the AI chooses. It sees the ten candidates closest to the target delta, each with its days to expiry, delta, premium, distance from the price, annualized yield and implied volatility, along with the stock's recent trend, its distance from the 50- and 200-day averages and the one-year high, its realized volatility, and the next earnings date if one falls within the next 50 days, with any contract that expires after earnings flagged. It can only pick from that list. When the model is off or does not answer, the rule takes over and picks the call nearest a 0.30 delta or the put nearest a 0.25 delta.
Each Turn of the Wheel Leads Into the Next
When a covered call is called away, the lot moves to the cash side, and the proceeds, the call's strike times a hundred times the contracts, are set aside so nothing else spends them. The next put, 2% to 10% below the price at that time, goes out at the next session. When a put is assigned, the lot moves back to shares and the next call follows. A contract that has lost half its premium is bought back to take the profit. Expiries and assignments are booked every night after the close; the first contract of a newly approved wheel goes out within minutes while the market is open, or shortly after the next open if you approve it in the evening.
The shares a wheel holds belong to it. A covered call written by hand, a manual sale or a managed allocation cannot take them, and while the wheel is running, a put written elsewhere cannot use the cash it is keeping for its own.
You Hear About Every Step
Every sale, expiry, call-away, assignment and buy-back arrives as an alert, and the wheel's page shows its stage, its contracts, the premium collected, your cost after premium and the cash kept for the next put, with a timeline of everything it has done. When the wheel cannot sell its next contract, because no strike fits the bands or the cash is short, it tells you once and says why, rather than repeating itself every night. Pause stops new contracts and manages the open one to its end, keeping the shares protected but releasing the cash; Resume picks the loop back up; Stop ends it after the open contract finishes.
The wheel is an Elite feature and runs on the Automation add-on, and the account's options approval and AI profile both have to allow covered calls and cash-secured puts. While a separate covered-call or cash-secured-put strategy has a contract open on the stock, the wheel cannot be started on it; once that contract ends, the wheel can take the stock over.