SOFI bull put spread: credit, risk, strikes

You are still selling downside — just not all of it. The long $14.5 put cuts the tail off below that level, which is why this needs $73 of buying power instead of the $1,550 a cash-secured put would tie up.

Above $15.5 at August 28, 2026, both puts expire worthless and you keep the full $27. Below $14.5, you lose the maximum $73. Breakeven is $15.23.

Return on risk is 37% for 27 days — 500% annualized. That headline is the reason people prefer spreads to cash-secured puts, and the reason spreads blow up accounts: the same capital supports several times the notional risk.

The risk is leverage, not the structure. $73 per spread is small; the temptation to sell ten of them because the buying power allows it is how a 68%-win-rate trade produces a losing year.

Between the strikes the loss scales linearly, so most of the damage happens fast when SOFI breaks $15.5. There is no assignment-and-hold escape hatch: the long put you own expires the same day.

The structural problem with short premium is not the loss rate, it is the loss SIZE. A long run of small wins funded by an occasional large loss looks like skill on a monthly statement and like variance on a five-year one.

The accessibility is genuine and so is the arithmetic problem behind it. At a mid-teens share price, 100 shares is a couple of thousand dollars and the premium is a healthy percentage of that — but it is also a small number of dollars, and commissions and half-cent slippage eat a meaningful share of a fifteen-dollar credit. This is the one name on the list where transaction costs belong in the yield calculation.

SOFI's Aug 28 strikes are $0.5 apart near the money (3.07% of spot). That is a coarse ladder: one rung is a large fraction of the implied move, so precision on the short strike is an illusion. 49k contracts of open interest on Aug 28 is workable around the money and thin in the wings — width costs more here than the ladder suggests. 20 strikes on that expiry — 48% of the board — carry prints that agree with their own implied volatility and hold up across the ladder, and those are the strikes priced here. Adequate at the near strikes, thin beyond them; the bid-ask is a large fraction of the premium at every strike.

Skew is inverted: the 25-delta CALL implies 6.0% more vol than the put. That is the market pricing upside risk above downside risk — a squeeze, a takeover rumour, or a crowded short. Selling calls into an inverted skew pays better than usual and is riskier than usual for exactly the same reason. The term structure is in contango: the back month implies 2.2% more vol than the front. Calm now, uncertainty later — which rewards selling the front month and makes the back month an expensive thing to own outright.

At 50% ATM implied vol, the Aug 28 options are pricing a one-standard-deviation move of $2.22 over 27 days — roughly −13.6% to +13.6%, or $14.09 to $18.53. A short-premium structure here is a bet that 13.6% over 27 days is more than SOFI will actually use. That is the thesis, stated honestly.

The SOFI-specific failure mode: Ignoring costs. A $0.02 slip on a $0.15 credit is thirteen percent of the trade, and no delta table shows you that.