One cycle from the put to the call-away

The wheel is one campaign, not a series of disconnected trades: sell a cash-secured put, get assigned, write covered calls against the shares, eventually get called away. The wheel tracker keeps that thread — cumulative premium, adjusted cost basis and annualized return carried from the first put to the last call.

Starting a cycle

• From a put: Start cycle → log the CSP (strike, expiry, premium, contracts). The cycle sits in the csp stage with collateral out.
• From shares you already own: start a covered-call cycle on an existing lot — see Covered calls.
• From trades you already have: Build from existing composes saved strategies and stock lots that are really one wheel into a single cycle — see below.

Assignment is the middle, not the end

Record an assignment and the tracker creates the stock lot for you, at the strike less the premium already collected — the number you actually care about. The cycle stays open and fully visible: “holding shares, no covered call” is an active state with an obvious next action, not an expired trade. Nothing auto-closes a cycle because an option leg expired or was assigned; a cycle closes when you close it or the shares leave.

How the return is worked out

A cycle’s return is its realized P/L — net premium banked, dividends, and any gain or loss on shares that have left — divided by the most capital the cycle ever committed at one time: the cash securing its puts, or the cost of the shares it held. Annualized scales that by 365 ÷ the days the cycle has run. Once a cycle is finished (no shares, nothing open), those days stop at its last event, the call-away or the final expiry, because that is when the capital came back, so a closed cycle’s rate no longer drifts down as it sits in your history. The denominator is the peak, not whatever is committed today. Sell three puts, get called away on two, and the income you earned was earned on three contracts’ worth of capital. Dividing it by the one contract still open would overstate the return about threefold. A cycle that never changed size reads exactly as it always did.

• Things that happen at the same moment count together. A roll records its close and its new sale with one timestamp, so the capital is measured after both. The old collateral and the new are never added up as if you held both.
• Shares leave oldest lot first (FIFO). When shares are called away or sold, the realized gain is booked against the oldest lot the cycle holds. That is the same rule the portfolio and your realized ledger use, so the wheel page and the ledger book the same cost for the same shares.

Assignment risk on the cycle

While a cycle has a live short put or call, its card and its page show, where our data allows, how far that leg is in or out of the money and its ITM odds, the chance it finishes in the money. Short calls also get the ex-dividend check, which flags early-assignment risk when a declared dividend is larger than the call’s time value (for an out-of-the-money call, its premium plus how far it is below the strike). The cycle page’s Assignment risk block spells each one out, with Roll lab and Alert me beside the leg. These flags are free. See Roll lab and assignment risk for what each one means and what happens when data is missing.

Rolling inside a cycle

Rolling a cycle’s short leg is not an edit to a trade — it is a close and an open, and that is exactly how it is written, so cumulative premium, adjusted basis and the open leg all stay right. A roll logged from the Roll Lab (Pro) writes the two as linked events, so each roll in a chain points back to the one before it. The lab ranks the rolls near your leg, draws the one you pick over the position, and shows the effective wheel basis before → after. That basis is net of every premium on the cycle and is not your tax basis. You can also open the position in Explore, free, to see rolls ranked: what each pays at today’s marks, how much collateral it frees or needs, and a flag on any that only pays because it moves closer to the money. Apply the one you want and confirm. Ivy will price and rank rolls for you too, and can open the lab on a candidate. She can write the close-and-open onto the cycle once you confirm it; rewriting a saved position’s legs stays here, behind Apply.

Auto-detect: the wheel finds itself

Sell a new put on a ticker you are already wheeling — through the builder, the copilot, or an import — and it attaches to that cycle automatically. Same for a covered call written against cycle shares. The position wears a chip naming the cycle it joined, so nothing happens silently.

If the guess was wrong, the chip’s Detach action moves the auto-attached position out into its own standalone cycle — nothing is deleted, the trade really happened — and the app remembers the detach, so the same suggestion is never made again for that position. Only auto-attached events ever move; anything you logged by hand is never disturbed.

Build a wheel from existing trades

Already holding the pieces as separate rows — a closed CSP here, an assigned lot there, two covered calls from an import? Start cycle → Build from existing trades lets you select them, and the composer sorts what it can into one cycle: the right event order, the right cumulative premium, the right adjusted basis. Where the inference had to guess (a lot that might not be the assignment, an entry it cannot see), it asks before saving rather than booking a wrong basis.

Share a position or a finished cycle

Share on a cycle gives you a public link anyone can open — no account on either end. What you get depends on where the trade actually is, not on whether you have closed the cycle: while something is still working you share the story so far — the call or put working, its strike and expiry, your adjusted basis per share, what the premium is earning per month. Once the shares are gone you share how it played out: entry and exit per share, the premium banked, and the total return over the days you held it.

Because the link carries no size, the shared card tells the trade as one contract would have run it, over that story’s own dates. This page describes your actual book. For a cycle that never changed size the two are the same trade, and their returns match. Once you scale in or out — three contracts sold, two called away — they are two honest answers to different questions. The card is what one contract of this strategy earned. The wheel page is what your money earned. Their percentages can then differ. Every figure on the card can be worked out from the prices printed on it, and nothing on it is blanked out to hide that the book changed size, because a gap would give that away just as surely.

Anyone opening the link can copy the trade to their account, which lands them in the builder on the same structure at today’s chain — priced live, at one contract against one hundred shares. It is the strategy that travels, not your position, because the link never carried a size to copy in the first place.

The recap card

From the wheel page you can generate a monthly recap card — premium collected, cycles worked, realized results — as a shareable image. Every figure on it is folded by the engine from your logged events.