A good cash-secured put scanner saves you the most tedious hour in options income trading: pulling an entire option chain, computing returns strike by strike, and filtering out the illiquid junk. Prisma Group built that scanner into Nora, our AI trading terminal inside Discord — so the full-chain scan is a one-line request instead of an afternoon in a spreadsheet.
The Strategy in Brief: CSPs and the Wheel
Selling a cash-secured put means you agree to buy 100 shares of a stock at a set strike price, and you're paid a premium upfront for making that promise. The "cash-secured" part means you hold enough cash to actually honor the assignment — no leverage, no margin surprises. Two outcomes: the stock stays above your strike and you keep the premium, or you're assigned shares at a discount to where they traded when you entered. Many income traders then sell covered calls on those shares — the "wheel" strategy — turning assignment into another income leg.
It's one of the most disciplined ways to generate options income, but it lives or dies on strike selection. Pick a strike too close and you get assigned in a selloff; too far and the premium isn't worth the capital lockup. That selection problem is exactly what the scanner solves.
What the Scanner Returns
Ask Nora for cash-secured puts on any covered symbol and she scans the full option chain, then ranks candidates by return and safety. Every candidate comes back with the numbers that matter:
- Premium — the mid-price income you'd collect per contract.
- Breakeven — your effective purchase price if assigned, shown with its distance below spot.
- Annualized ROC — return on capital annualized, so candidates across different expiries compare apples to apples.
- ROC for the period — the raw return over the life of the trade.
- Open interest — so you skip strikes you couldn't actually fill at a fair price.
Example: An AAPL Scan
A representative scan on Apple, 21 days to expiry, returns ranked candidates like this: the $210 put with a premium of $185 at mid, a breakeven of $208.15 sitting 2.5% below spot, a 15.3% annualized return on capital (0.88% for the period), and 8.4k open interest — deep enough liquidity for a clean fill. You see at a glance the trade-off each strike offers: more premium for accepting assignment closer to price, or more cushion for accepting less return. The scanner surfaces the data; the decision stays with you.
Who It Suits
The CSP scanner is built for income-oriented traders: people running the wheel on quality names, investors happy to own a stock at a discount and get paid to wait, and anyone who prefers defined, capped-risk premium selling over directional speculation. It pairs naturally with Nora's covered-call scanner for the other half of the wheel, and with her GEX analysis when you want to know whether the broader dealer positioning supports selling premium at all.
Both scanners are included with Prisma Pro and Prisma Elite — compare plans on the pricing section. And because Prisma Group logs every signal publicly, you can judge our overall trading discipline on the public track record before subscribing. Options involve risk, including assignment at unfavorable prices — nothing here is financial advice.
Scanner output is educational data, not a recommendation to trade any contract.