The option chain is the marketplace where every trade on this site actually happens. It looks intimidating — a wall of numbers — but it's just a menu. This guide teaches you to read the menu and order without overpaying. It's broker-neutral: the buttons differ everywhere, but the numbers mean the same thing.
What you're looking at
Open any option chain and you see rows and columns. Each row is a strike price. The left half of the row shows calls at that strike; the right half shows puts. A dropdown or tab picks the expiration — switching it shows a whole different set of rows.
So when a trade idea says "sell the 45-day $95 put," you pick the expiration about 45 days out, find the $95 row, and look at the put side. Everything you need is on that one row.
Bid, ask, and the mid
Each option shows two prices:
- Bid — what buyers are currently offering to pay. If you sell, this is (roughly) what you get.
- Ask — what sellers are currently demanding. If you buy, this is (roughly) what you pay.
- Mid — the midpoint between them. The fair-ish price where a deal should happen.
When we sell a put, we place our order at or near the mid — not at the bid. Hitting the bid is leaving money on the table; the market will usually meet you in the middle if you're patient for a few minutes.
The spread is a tax
The gap between bid and ask — the spread — is a cost you pay on every trade, entering and exiting. A put quoted at $1.90 bid / $2.10 ask has a $0.20 spread: about 10% of the price evaporates into the gap.
On liquid underlyings the spread is pennies. On thin, illiquid options it can be 20–30% of the premium — you'd start every trade deep in a hole. Rule: if the spread is a large fraction of the premium, walk away. This is also why our screens demand liquid underlyings before an idea ever reaches you: we only publish trades we'd take ourselves, and we don't take trades where the spread eats the edge.
Open interest and volume
Two more columns tell you whether anyone actually trades this contract:
- Open interest — how many contracts currently exist. Hundreds or thousands is healthy; single digits is a ghost town.
- Volume — how many traded today. Zero on a quiet day is fine if open interest is healthy.
Ghost-town contracts have wide spreads and unreliable prices. Healthy ones fill fairly. When in doubt, pick the strike with real open interest.
The delta column
Most chains show a delta for each option — a number between 0 and 1 (sometimes shown as 0–100). Read it as a rough probability: a put with a delta of 0.15 has roughly a 15% chance of ending in the money.
Our equity screens sell puts around 10–20 delta — roughly a 10–20% chance the option ends in the money at expiry. One quirk: most brokers show put deltas as negative numbers, so our 10–20 delta put appears as −0.10 to −0.20 on the chain. Same thing, minus sign. That's the seller's edge stated as a number: we collect premium on bets the market itself prices as likely to expire worthless. Delta isn't a prophecy, but it's the market's honest estimate, and we use it on every entry.
Placing the order without getting ripped off
Four phrases, then the golden rule:
- Sell to open — starting a short position. This is us, most days.
- Buy to close — ending that short position. Taking profits or cutting losses.
- Credit — money comes to you (selling). Debit — money leaves you (buying).
The golden rule: always use a limit order, never a market order. A market order buys at the ask or sells at the bid — the worst price on the screen — and in fast markets it can fill far worse than what you saw. A limit order says "fill me at this price or better, or don't fill me at all." Place it at the mid. If nothing happens in a few minutes, adjust by a penny or two toward the other side — but never chase. If you can't get filled near the idea's premium, the edge you saw may not exist at your fill. Walk away. There will be another idea tomorrow.
Example
A trade idea says: sell the $95 put, 45 days out, collect ~$2.00. On the chain, the $95 put shows bid $1.90 / ask $2.10, open interest 1,400, delta −0.14 (negative, as most brokers show puts). You place a limit order to sell to open at $2.00 (the mid). It fills at $2.00 — $200 of premium, minus a small commission. Two weeks later it's worth $1.00; you place a limit order to buy to close at $1.00 and keep the $100 difference. That's the whole round trip.
The short version
- Rows are strikes, columns are calls/puts, the tab picks the expiration.
- Bid = what you get selling. Ask = what you pay buying. Trade at the mid.
- A wide bid-ask spread is a tax — skip illiquid contracts.
- Healthy open interest means fair fills. Ghost towns mean wide spreads.
- Delta ≈ chance of ending in the money. We sell 10–20 delta.
- Limit orders only. Sell to open at the mid; buy to close to exit. Can't get filled near the idea's price? Walk away.
See it live, every trading day
Our screens publish fresh ideas each morning — puts, calls, spreads, futures — every one tracked publicly, winners and losers.