Build and price a trade on the strike ladder

The builder is where a trade takes shape: pick a strategy template and a ticker, and the legs come off the live option chain. Everything downstream — payoff, Greeks, breakevens, chance of profit — is computed by our own engine from that chain, and it all recomputes live as you move a strike. No account needed.

Start from a template

Open the builder and pick from 58 templates — long calls and cash-secured puts through condors, calendars, ratio spreads and synthetics. The control beside the ticker search is your default trade type: it is sticky, so typing a ticker and pressing Enter anywhere in the app drops you straight into that builder with real legs loaded.

Or describe the goal and let AI build it

Above the ladder sits Describe your goal — AI builds it: type something like “mildly bullish NVDA next month, collect premium, limited risk” and the whole structure lands on the canvas — template, ticker, a sensible expiry and legs priced from the live chain, with one line of reasoning for why that shape. It is a starting point, not a verdict: everything it places is an ordinary leg you can drag, re-strike or delete, and Cmd+Z removes the whole suggestion in one step.

The strike ladder

• Drag a chip along the ladder and the payoff graph, the price×date matrix and the summary recompute as you move. Strikes snap to what the chain actually lists.
• Arrow keys nudge a focused chip one strike at a time.
• The premium re-defaults from the chain when a strike changes; a manual premium override resets with an undo toast so nothing is lost silently.
• Right-click empty ladder space to add a leg at that strike, with each of buy/sell call/put priced from the chain.

The leg menu

Every chip carries its own menu — click it, right-click it, tap it on a phone, or press Enter while it has focus. Inside: a strike stepper, a contracts stepper, strike-by-delta, expiry, buy/sell to close, switch call/put, duplicate, mute and remove. Rows that change the price show the resulting net debit or credit before you choose. Muting a leg keeps it on the ladder, dashed, but drops it out of every number — a quick way to see the trade without one wing.

Reading the numbers

Switch between the payoff graph and the price×date matrix above the ladder. Max profit, max loss and breakevens come from the engine’s own P/L model; chance of profit is lognormal on each leg’s implied volatility. Quotes are 15-minute delayed during market hours — the freshness chip by the summary says exactly what you are looking at.

The address bar is the share link

The URL rewrites on every edit and pins your entry premiums plus the date. Send it to anyone: opened next month it still shows the trade you built, with entry, current mark, and the return since. A hand-typed URL without pinned premiums is a template and re-quotes live — the builder labels which of the two you are looking at.