Selling cash-secured puts on AAPL

Selling a put transfers the downside between $295 and zero to you, and you are paid $3.80 per share for taking it. "Cash-secured" simply means you hold the $29,500 required to buy the shares instead of leaning on margin. Same position, honest denominator.

At August 28, 2026: above $295 the put expires worthless and you keep $380 — that is the maximum this trade can make, $380. Below it you're assigned 100 shares at $295, with an effective cost basis of $291.2 once the credit is applied. That is 5.7% below where AAPL trades today.

The engine puts the probability of keeping the full credit at 79% on AAPL at $308.91 with 27% ATM implied vol on the Aug 28 expiry. High win rate, capped payoff, uncapped-to-zero loss — the risk profile of every short-premium trade. It is not free money; it is a rent cheque for underwriting someone else's insurance.

The real-world failure mode is a gap, and AAPL has the catalysts for one: quarterly earnings, September product events, and its dividend cycle. A put sold 4.5% out of the money offers no protection at all against a move twice that size overnight.

Assignment is not the loss — being assigned at $295 when AAPL is at $236 is. If you are running the wheel, that is the moment the plan is tested: you own shares at a basis of $291.2 and the market disagrees.

Liquidity is a risk, not a convenience. The moment you most want out of a short-premium position is the moment the spread is widest, and the exit price you modelled at mid will not be available.

The reference covered-call underlying, and the reason is boring in the best way: a low-20s vol that realizes close to where it implies, a dividend that makes the ex-date calendar matter, and enough open interest at round strikes that you can roll a position for years without ever touching a bad fill. The premium is not exciting; it is repeatable, which is what a covered-call underlying is for.

AAPL's Aug 28 strikes are $5 apart near the money (1.62% 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. 32k 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. 18 strikes on that expiry — 41% 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. Penny-wide almost everywhere. If a spread will not fill near mid on Apple, the price is wrong, not the market.

Skew is inverted: the 25-delta CALL implies 1.7% 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 flat inside 1.5% between the two captured expiries, so there is no calendar edge to harvest and no event visibly priced into one month over the other.

At 27% ATM implied vol, the Aug 28 options are pricing a one-standard-deviation move of $22.60 over 27 days — roughly −7.3% to +7.3%, or $286.31 to $331.51. A short-premium structure here is a bet that 7.3% over 27 days is more than AAPL will actually use. That is the thesis, stated honestly.

The specific way people lose money on AAPL: Writing calls into a September product cycle at the same delta you used in July. The distribution changes; the delta table does not tell you that.