MOST PEOPLE SELLING CASH SECURED PUTS ARE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE!!! Did the how-they-work post already. This one is how to actually run them. Biggest mistake first, and it isn't strike selection or any of the stuff people argue about. It's when you sell them. Premium comes from implied volatility. Sell into a calm market and you're taking on the same obligation for a fraction of the pay. Sell into fear and it's 2 or 3x for the identical strike on the identical company. If a name has been drifting sideways for a month there's usually nothing worth selling and I just leave it alone. 1️⃣ Close at 50% This one annoyed me when I first worked it out, because it's so obvious in hindsight. Say you sell a put for $200 with 35 days on it. 10 days in, it's worth $100. You've collected half the premium in under a third of the time. Hold to expiry and you're at roughly 24% annualized. Close at 50% on day 10 and start again, you're at 47%. The back half of that premium is the slowest money you will ever collect, and you're carrying assignment risk the entire time you sit there waiting for it. Just take the easy half. 2️⃣ Roll for a credit or don't roll at all Stock drops and you're not ready for assignment. You can buy your put back and sell a lower strike further out. If the new premium covers what it costs to close plus something extra, that's a credit. Better strike, more time, and you got paid to do it. If it costs you money to roll, don't. Take the shares. That was always the plan. I've watched people roll at a debit 3 or 4 times in a row trying to avoid assignment on a stock they told everyone they wanted to own. Makes no sense. 3️⃣ Your collateral shouldn't be sitting in cash $9,500 in T-bills or a money market earns around $34 over a 35 day trade at current rates. Against a $200 premium that's 17% more income for doing nothing at all. Small on its own. Adds up over a year. 4️⃣ Ladder it Don't stack everything on one strike and one expiry. Spread the dates out so something is always coming off, cash is always freeing up, and one bad week doesn't land on your entire book at once. 5️⃣ Size the book, not the trade This is the one that actually hurts people. 5 puts open, market drops 12%, and you don't get assigned on one of them. You get assigned on all five, same day, and you need every dollar at the same time. Before you open anything, ask whether you'd be genuinely fine owning every single position at full size tomorrow morning. If the answer is no, you're already too big and you just haven't found out yet. 6️⃣ The wheel You got assigned. Fine. Sell a covered call above your cost basis. Called away and you're back in cash with two lots of premium plus the gain. Not called away, you keep the premium and go again next month. 7️⃣ Only on companies you've already done the work on The premium is the bonus for waiting. It's never the reason. Any time the yield is the most interesting thing about a trade, that's usually the market pricing in something you haven't looked at properly yet. Every premium you collect can go straight back into collateral. More collateral means bigger premiums means more collateral. Run that for a few years and the income is no longer pocket money. It’s a second salary that doesn’t require you to show up anywhere and it can literally REPLACE YOUR JOB if you do it long enough and with the right information. We run these constantly inside The Assembly and members post their wins daily. Come learn to do it properly if you want to build something real. If you’re serious about making money, join from my bio before we close access again.