Your put expired in the money. Here is what actually happens

Assignment is not a fee, a penalty, or a glitch in the broker’s software. It is the trade you already agreed to: if you sold a $110 put, you agreed to buy 100 shares at $110. When the stock is below $110 at expiration, that agreement is exercised against you. The only interesting numbers are the ones you already have — the credit you collected, and the basis that credit leaves you with.

This post walks a real PLTR put through assignment the way a broker confirms it and the way a tracker should book it. The quotes are the 1 August 2026 chain (15-minute delayed). The $104 mark after assignment is modeled and says so. Every figure is in lib/blog/figures.ts.

The trade you already made

You sold the right to put 100 shares to you at $110. In exchange the chain paid $4.90 a share — $490. You parked $11,000 so the broker believes you. Static return if the put expires worthless: 4.5% in 48 days. That is the happy branch, and it is not the subject of this post. The subject is the other 33.9%.

Open the same put in the builder if you want the live ladder next to this: PLTR 18 Sep $110 put. The PLTR cash-secured put page carries current-chain context.

What the broker does on assignment

1. 1The short put disappears. It is not ‘closed at intrinsic.‘ It is exercised. There is no second options fill to argue with.
2. 2You buy 100 shares at $110. Cash out: $11,000. That is the collateral you already posted, now spent.
3. 3Your stock basis is not $110. You already collected $4.90. Effective basis is $105.10 a share. Forget this and every covered call you write next looks like a worse yield than it is.
4. 4The shares show up, often over the weekend. Friday expiration, Monday morning you own PLTR. Your broker’s overnight email is a confirmation, not a negotiation.

That is the whole event. No extra commission in this telling (your broker’s schedule is yours). No ‘assignment fee’ that changes the basis. No option left to close. You are now a stockholder who got paid $490 to buy at a discount to Friday’s $110 strike, which may or may not still be a discount to Monday’s print.

The first mark after you own it

Suppose expiration Friday PLTR prints $104. You now hold 100 shares with basis $105.10. Unrealized on the stock versus that basis: −$110. That is the same $110 the put lost against the credit, restated as a stock position. Traders who close the put in their head at $0.00 and then ‘buy’ the shares at $104 have invented a $490 gain and a $100 stock loss that never happened as two trades. It was one assignment.

From here the wheel is a covered-call problem on a lot whose basis is $105.10, not $123.06 and not $110. Write a call below $105.10 and you are volunteering to sell at a realized loss. Write above it and the premium continues the basis reduction. That is the whole wheel, and it only works if assignment was booked as a stock trade at the strike minus credit.

Cash-secured means the $11,000 is already there. Assignment does not invent a margin call on this trade; it spends the collateral you posted when you sold the put. If you sold a naked put instead, assignment is a different animal — the broker buys the shares and you fund them, possibly by force. This post is the cash-secured case. Do not import its calm into a naked short.

Early assignment, and the dividend

American puts can be exercised any day. In practice, early put assignment is uncommon until the put is deep in the money and the remaining extrinsic is smaller than the interest on the strike — or someone needs the stock for a reason the model does not know. It still happens. If you are assigned early you buy the shares now, the put is gone now, and you start earning (or paying) whatever the stock does from that print. Your DTE clock on the option is over.

Calls are the other direction: a short call against stock you hold can be assigned early into an ex-dividend. That is a covered-call problem, not a CSP one, and it is why a 20-delta call into a large special dividend is not the same trade as a 20-delta call in a quiet month. This post is the put. Do not take the call version as zero because the put version is quiet.

How a tracker should book it — including $0.00

In OptionTracker a cash-secured put that is assigned is a cycle event: assigned, strike $110, price $110, qty 1. The engine’s cycle math takes the shares onto the lot at $110 and keeps the $490 in cumulative premium, so adjusted basis is $105.10 without anyone typing it. A covered call you sell next attaches to that lot. If the put expired worthless, that is a $0.00 close of the option, not an assignment — two different buttons, two different truths. Mixing them is how a wheel’s realized ledger quietly lies for a year.

• Assigned = you own the shares at the strike. Basis walks down by the put credit.
• Expired worthless = $0.00 close on the put, cash stays cash, no shares. That $0.00 is a real price.
• Bought to close = you paid a debit to not be assigned. Book the debit. Do not also book shares.
• The wheel tracker is built for this sequence. A spreadsheet that collapses assignment into ‘put P/L’ and starts the stock at the Monday open will disagree with your 1099, and it will be the spreadsheet that is wrong.

If you would rather have been long the stock at $123.06 than wait for a $110 fill, that is the CSP vs buying comparison, not an assignment complaint. Assignment delivered the fill you sold. Whether you wanted that fill is a strike-selection question — delta and IV — and it was answerable on the day you sold the put.

What to do Monday morning

1. 1Confirm the share count and the basis your broker shows. It should be 100 shares at $110 with a $490 credit sitting in the options history, which is $105.10 economically even if the 1099 splits the line items.
2. 2Decide whether you are a stockholder on purpose. If not, sell the shares. That is a new trade, at Monday’s price, with its own P/L against $105.10.
3. 3If you are in the wheel, pick a covered-call strike above $105.10 unless you are deliberately taking a realized loss. Price it on the live chain, not on this snapshot.
4. 4Log the assignment in the tracker the way it happened. Do not close the put at a penny and add a lot by hand. The cycle event exists so those two rows cannot disagree.