Are you having trouble planning out your trades? Would you like to know exactly how much money you stand to gain or lose before you ever even make a trade? Well, you can do exactly just that when you trade stock options. In fact, I wrote a blog post detailing how such a trade may look in the real world.
If you are like me, you like to calculate your potential gains and losses before you even enter a trade. But that does involve a bit of math and it can sometimes get a little confusing. So I designed the calculators below to help you better understand and plan for your best-case and worst-case scenarios of what can happen when you use options trading to hedge your positions.
This first calculator below can be used to calculate the maximum amount of money you can expect to make if you were to buy shares in a stock and immediately sells calls.
This calculator can be used to figure out what your maximum loss might be in a stock if you were to buy both shares of a stock and puts to help hedge against a loss.
This is a put options credit spread calculator. It is used to figure out what your maximum gains and losses might be if you were to sell puts at a higher strike price than you buy the puts at. Example, sell puts at $10.00 and buy at $7.50 with the same expiration date.
The calculator below can be used if you want buy shares of a stock, sell calls in the stock and also buy puts. With this type of trading you’ll know exactly what your maximum gain and loss will be before you even make the trades.
If you look at the max gain loss calculator for when covered calls are sold and puts are bought together, you’ll notice the max gain and loss values will be a little bit different than what was calculated with the other two calculators. Our max gain is a little different here because we went and bought puts to go with our covered calls. Since buying puts cost money, they cut into our maximum gain potential. Similarly, the maximum loss in this scenario is not as low as it would be if we just bought puts alone. That’s because we sold covered calls, and that helps to offset a loss more than buying puts alone in the event that the stock price goes down.