Selling cash-secured puts on SOFI

Selling a put transfers the downside between $15.5 and zero to you, and you are paid $0.52 per share for taking it. "Cash-secured" simply means you hold the $1,550 required to buy the shares instead of leaning on margin. Same position, honest denominator.

At August 28, 2026: above $15.5 the put expires worthless and you keep $52 — that is the maximum this trade can make, $52. Below it you're assigned 100 shares at $15.5, with an effective cost basis of $14.98 once the credit is applied. That is 8.2% below where SOFI trades today.

The engine puts the probability of keeping the full credit at 73% on SOFI at $16.31 with 50% 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 SOFI has the catalysts for one: earnings, rate expectations, and student-loan policy headlines. A put sold 5.0% out of the money offers no protection at all against a move twice that size overnight.

Assignment is not the loss — being assigned at $15.5 when SOFI is at $12.4 is. If you are running the wheel, that is the moment the plan is tested: you own shares at a basis of $14.98 and the market disagrees.

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). Coarse enough that the strike you want frequently does not exist, and the nearest rung is a different trade. 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. Everything the cash-secured put above collects is rent on that range. If SOFI routinely covers 13.6% in 27 days, the credit is fair compensation rather than edge.

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.