Disclaimers

What OptionsX is

OptionsX is a web application for building, pricing and sending multi-leg options orders, and for analysing options positions. It does two things. It turns reusable strategy templates into concrete orders by resolving relative strikes and expirations against a live options chain. And it reads your open positions and produces a ranked list of possible adjustments, priced against current market data.

OptionsX is not a brokerage. It does not hold your money or your securities, it does not maintain an account for you, and it does not clear or settle anything. It does not manage your account, exercise discretion over your portfolio, or charge a fee based on your results.

OptionsX is not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a broker-dealer or as an investment adviser, and it is not a member of FINRA, SIPC or the NFA. The protections you would have when dealing with a registered firm do not apply to your relationship with us. Your relationship with your broker is separate, and your broker's own agreements govern it.

Nothing on this site or in the application is personalised investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or an offer to do either. Every decision to open, adjust or close a position is yours.

Who executes your orders, and who holds your money

Execution happens at tastytrade, and only at tastytrade. You connect your own tastytrade account through tastytrade's OAuth. When you approve an order in OptionsX, OptionsX transmits it to that account. tastytrade accepts or rejects it, executes it, clears it and settles it. Your funds and securities stay with tastytrade at all times. OptionsX never holds them and has no ability to move them out.

tastytrade can reject an order at its own discretion — on price, on size, on buying power, or because of market conditions. Sending an order is not the same as getting filled. Between your click and the market sit our software, the public internet, tastytrade's systems and an exchange, and any of them can be slow, wrong or unavailable. Orders, cancels and modifications can be delayed, rejected, partially filled, filled at a price different from the one you saw, or not sent at all.

A dry run is an estimate. It is a pre-trade check we ask tastytrade to run. It does not reserve a price, it does not bind tastytrade or any exchange, and a live fill can differ from it.

Your tastytrade account is the record that counts. If what OptionsX shows you and what your brokerage account shows you disagree, your brokerage account is right. Check it.

So that OptionsX can reach your account on your instruction, it stores an encrypted per-user refresh token. That token lives server-side only; the browser application never receives it. You can revoke the connection from OptionsX or from tastytrade at any time.

Aggressive chase: what you authorise when you start one

Most orders in OptionsX are submitted one at a time, by you. The aggressive chase feature works differently, and you should understand it before you use it.

When you start a chase, you set a starting price, a step size, the worst price you are willing to accept, and a maximum number of iterations. OptionsX then runs a loop on our servers: submit, wait, check, and if the order has not filled, cancel it, step the price toward the market, and submit again. It repeats until the order fills, reaches the worst price you set, or hits your iteration limit. Within the bounds you set, it does all of that without asking you again. Each of those submissions is a live order at a price you did not individually approve.

That is the point of the feature, and it is also its risk. The price moves against you by design — toward the market and away from where you started. A chase can fill your entire order at your worst price.

A chase runs on our servers, not in your browser. If you close the tab or lose your connection, OptionsX attempts to cancel the outstanding order, but that cancel can fail. If it does, a live order can remain working in your tastytrade account at a price stepped away from where you began. Check your tastytrade account before you assume a chase has stopped. You can stop a chase yourself at any time.

Imported accounts are read-only

OptionsX can import positions from other U.S. brokerages — Robinhood, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, E*TRADE, Webull, Interactive Brokers, Tradier and TradeStation — through SnapTrade. Those connections are read-only. OptionsX does not request trading permissions on them and has no code path that places, modifies or cancels an order in an imported account. If you want to act on an imported position, you do it with that broker directly.

Imported data can be stale, incomplete or wrong. It is fetched from each brokerage on that brokerage's terms; transaction history typically lags by around a day, freshness varies by brokerage, and an integration can break without notice. Positions imported this way are analysed on a delayed market data feed, typically around fifteen minutes behind the market, and we label delayed data where it appears. Treat an imported position as a view, not as the truth. Your brokerage's own records are the truth.

Execution is tastytrade only. Connecting an imported brokerage does not add an execution venue.

Options risk, and the document to read first

Options are not suitable for all investors. Options trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not appropriate for everyone. You can lose the entire amount you put into a position, quickly, and in some structures you can lose considerably more than that.

Before you trade options, read Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options — the industry disclosure document published by the Options Clearing Corporation. It explains what these contracts are, how they are exercised and settled, and how they lose money. Your broker gave you a copy when your options account was approved, and OCC always publishes the current version at the link below. We link it because you should read it. Linking it does not discharge anyone's obligation to deliver it to you.

• Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options (Options Clearing Corporation)

Multi-leg and spread risk

Every strategy template in OptionsX is a multi-leg position — between three and twenty legs across one to six orders — and multi-leg positions carry risks a single option does not.

You may not be able to open or close all legs at once, or at the prices you wanted. Legging in or out leaves you exposed to the market in between. You can lose money on both sides of the same structure. If one leg is exercised, assigned or closed while the others are still open, your risk profile changes immediately and is no longer the one you planned.

You pay commissions, exchange fees and regulatory fees on every leg, going in and coming out. On an eight-leg or twenty-leg structure those costs are material, and the underlying has to move meaningfully in your favour before the position is profitable at all. Bid-ask spreads compound the same way, and wide spreads on the outer legs of a large structure can make a position expensive to exit at any price you would accept.

Complexity you do not fully understand is itself a risk factor. The OCC disclosure document says exactly that, and it is right.

A note on "free" structures

Options traders call a structure a "free butterfly", or a "free fly", when a favourable move lets them buy the far wing for roughly what they have already collected, so the residual position carries no additional debit. That is a term of art about cost basis. It does not mean the position is without risk, and it does not mean it was free.

No options position is free of risk or free of cost. A credit received is not profit — it is money you may have to give back. Commissions, exchange fees and regulatory fees apply to every leg of every adjustment, and an adjustment that reduces one risk almost always introduces another. Where OptionsX talks about locking in a gain or removing remaining downside, read it as what it says: reducing exposure that is still there, at a cost. Not eliminating risk.

Assignment and early exercise

American-style options — individual stocks and ETFs — can be assigned at any time before expiration, without warning. You may not find out for a day or more, and once you have been assigned you can no longer close that leg. On a spread, an assignment removes one component and changes your risk immediately, including turning a defined-risk position into an unhedged one and into a margin call.

Index options such as SPX and SPXW are European-style and can only be exercised at expiration, so they do not carry early-assignment risk. OptionsX templates span both kinds. Know which one you are trading.

On cash-settled index spreads, a long leg does not automatically bail out a short leg. If a short leg is assigned, what you owe is fixed against a settlement value determined at a particular time. If the index moves before you can act on the long leg, exercising it may not produce enough cash to cover what you owe. In that specific respect a cash-settled index spread is riskier than the same spread on a physically settled option.

Pin risk is real. If the underlying finishes at or very near a strike you are short, you may not know until after the close whether you were assigned, and you can end up carrying an unhedged overnight position you did not choose.

Expiration, settlement, and how OptionsX picks a contract

Index options and equity options do not settle the same way. SPX and SPXW are cash-settled: nothing is delivered and you settle in cash. Equity and ETF options are physically settled: you can be assigned shares, and you need the buying power or the stock to handle it.

Watch the root symbol. SPX is AM-settled — it stops trading the business day before its settlement value is calculated from opening prices. SPXW stops trading at 4:00pm ET on the expiration day itself. Two contracts that look like the same Friday can behave completely differently, and the settlement value of an AM-settled index option is calculated from prices you can no longer trade against.

Official settlement values are determined by the index's reporting authority and are conclusive, even if a price used to calculate them is later found to have been wrong. The prices and P&L that OptionsX displays are not the settlement basis.

OptionsX resolves relative expirations by targeting a date a set number of calendar days from a base expiration and snapping to the nearest listed expiration. Where both an AM root and a PM/weekly root are listed on the same date, it prefers the PM/weekly root. That is a choice the software makes for you. Confirm the exact root, strike and expiration on the order review screen before you submit.

Short-dated and zero-days-to-expiration positions

Zero-days-to-expiration and other short-dated positions compress everything into hours. Small moves in the underlying produce outsized swings in an option's value, time value bleeds away fast, and a long option can go to zero on the same day you bought it. Gamma risk near a strike is at its most extreme here.

Two things people underestimate. Your broker can liquidate a short-dated position on its own initiative before the close, at a price you did not choose — a risk that grows the later in the day you open. And an index option can settle after the close on a value you can no longer trade against.

Never assume you will get a chance to manage a short-dated position. Size it as though you will not.

Undefined risk, margin, and liquidation

Some positions you can build or adjust into on OptionsX have undefined risk — the loss is not capped by a long wing. Writing uncovered calls carries unlimited loss potential. Writing uncovered puts carries substantial loss potential, up to the full value of the underlying.

Adjustments can do this too. Closing a protective leg, rolling one side away, or closing part of a structure can convert a defined-risk position into an undefined-risk one. OptionsX will let you build custom templates and stage adjustments that have exactly that effect. Whether you should is a matter for your judgement and for the approval level your broker has given you.

Short options are subject to margin. If the market moves against you, or volatility or liquidity changes, tastytrade can demand significant additional margin and can liquidate your positions with little or no prior notice, at prices you did not choose. OptionsX does not control your margin and cannot prevent a liquidation. If your broker closes part of a structure, what OptionsX shows you about that trade no longer reflects what you actually hold.

Your broker requires separate approval for uncovered writing and will give you the Special Statement for Uncovered Option Writers before your first such trade. Read it.

• Special Statement for Uncovered Option Writers (tastytrade)
• tastytrade disclosures and policies

Max loss, max gain and breakeven stop being true the moment you adjust

Any maximum loss, maximum gain or breakeven that OptionsX shows you holds only while the position still contains all of its original legs at their original quantities. Roll it, scale it, add a leg, close part of it, or get assigned, and those figures are no longer valid. You now hold a different position with a different risk profile, and it has to be recalculated.

This matters more here than on most platforms, because proposing exactly those changes is what the AI feature is for.

The AI feature: what it does, and what it does not do

When you ask OptionsX to look at a position, it reads the option legs in your connected account and returns a ranked list of possible adjustments — rolls, scales, close-replace, add-leg, close-partial — each priced against current market data. It draws on our own documented library of strategy adjustments and, once you have enough closed trades recorded in OptionsX, on how your own past adjustments actually settled.

It is a large language model working from position data, market data and that history. It is not a predictive model. It does not forecast prices or volatility. It is not trained on other users' data. It cannot place a trade.

It can be wrong, and it can be confidently wrong. It can misread a position, misprice a leg, work from stale or bad data, or rank a poor adjustment highly. A ranking reflects the model's assessment against the criteria we built into it. It is not a guarantee that a higher-ranked adjustment will perform better.

The output is an analysis. It is not a recommendation and it is not personalised investment advice. OptionsX does not know your income, your tax position, your time horizon, your other holdings or your risk tolerance, and it sees only the accounts you have connected. Nothing it produces is an opinion that a trade is suitable for you.

Every suggestion is staged as a draft order. You review it, you dry-run it, and you submit it — or you don't. The one place you hand over limited authority is the aggressive chase described above, and even there you set the bounds. Verify strikes, expirations, quantities and prices yourself before you approve anything.

The numbers on this site

Three different kinds of number appear on our pages, and they deserve different treatment.

— Interface figures. Dollar amounts, P&L, theta, implied volatility, IV rank, probability of profit and settled-green counts shown inside screenshots and interface mock-ups are examples chosen to show what the product looks like. They are not real trades, not our results, and not yours. In particular, the adjustment win-rates shown in the AI section are sample display values. OptionsX does not claim any success rate for its adjustment suggestions.

— Strategy statistics. Where we describe how a strategy has performed — for example that roughly 83% of documented CrownFly trades needed no adjustment, or an average of 4.5-6.5% of maximum margin per A14 trade — those figures come from approximately 48 trades placed by OptionsX's founder over about five months. They are one person's trades in a small number of strategies. They are self-reported, not audited, not verified by any third party, not a complete record of every trade in the strategy, and not the results of any OptionsX user. They are gross figures: they do not reflect commissions, exchange and regulatory fees, or slippage, which on a multi-leg structure are material. They cover less than twelve months. Your results will differ, because your entry timing, position size, strike selection and the market conditions you trade into will all differ.

— Targets and model outputs. A profit target describes an exit rule built into a strategy. It is not a return we have achieved or expect to achieve for you. A theta figure describes the modelled daily decay of one specified position at a stated size on a stated underlying — it is not income, and it is not a rate you should annualise. Probability of profit, greeks and prices are model estimates computed from current market data. They rest on assumptions that will not hold exactly, they change continuously, and they are not a measure of how likely you are to make money.

— Backtests and parameter sweeps. Where a configuration was chosen by scoring many candidates against historical data, it carries a built-in flaw: it was selected with hindsight, so it will always look better on the data it was selected from than it does in live trading. Backtested and optimised results were not traded with real money and should not be the basis for a trading decision.

Past results — real or modelled — do not predict future results, and should not and cannot be viewed as an indicator of future performance.

Market data

Live quotes and greeks in OptionsX stream from DXFeed under your own broker's market data entitlement. We show you data your tastytrade account is already entitled to see; we do not resell it. Accounts imported read-only through SnapTrade are analysed on a delayed feed, typically around fifteen minutes behind the market, and we label delayed data where it appears.

Market data is licensed to you for your own use inside OptionsX. You may not extract, store, redistribute or resell it.

Quotes, greeks, implied volatility, probability of profit and every number derived from them come from third-party providers and from calculations run on their data. Feeds lag, gap and fail. Exchanges have outages. Our software has bugs. We make no warranty that any price, greek or probability shown is accurate, complete, current or correctly sequenced. Confirm pricing with your broker before you act on it, and treat every dry-run result as an estimate rather than a fill.

No investment, tax or legal advice

Nothing on this site or in the application is investment advice, a recommendation, or an opinion that a security or a strategy is suitable for you. Using OptionsX does not create an advisory or fiduciary relationship. We do not monitor your account or your positions for you, and we have no obligation to tell you when something changes or when a position moves against you.

OptionsX does not give tax advice, and nothing it shows you accounts for your tax position. Options tax treatment is genuinely tricky and it changes what a trade is worth. Broad-based index options such as SPX and RUT are section 1256 contracts: they are marked to market at year end and taxed 60% long-term and 40% short-term no matter how long you held them. Equity and ETF options are not. Rolling, scaling and partially closing positions — the adjustments this product is built around — can trigger wash-sale and straddle rules that defer or disallow losses. Assignment and early exercise carry their own consequences. Talk to your own tax adviser before you rely on any P&L figure you see here.

OptionsX does not give legal advice. If you want advice about your own circumstances, speak to a licensed professional who knows them.

The software is provided as-is

OptionsX is provided as-is and as-available, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied — including no warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or uninterrupted or error-free operation.

That matters more here than in most software, because this software sends real orders into a real account. Concretely: feeds drop mid-session. A chain can resolve to a strike or an expiration you did not intend. A dry run can pass and the live fill differ. Chase logic moves a price against you by design and can fill you at your worst price. A connection can fail mid-order and leave a working order behind. An AI suggestion can be structurally wrong for the position it is looking at. Any of these can cost you money.

You are responsible for reviewing every order before you approve it, and for monitoring every position after it is submitted. To the maximum extent the law allows, we are not liable for trading losses, missed fills, unfilled orders, duplicate orders, or any other loss arising out of your use of OptionsX. Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, so parts of this may not apply to you.

Who can use OptionsX

OptionsX is offered to individuals in the United States who are at least 18 years old, hold their own brokerage account, and have been granted an invitation. Access is invite-only, and we may decline or revoke access at our discretion.

Nothing on this site is an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security, or to open a brokerage account, in any jurisdiction where such an offer or solicitation would be unlawful, or where we or your broker are not authorised to operate. If you are outside the United States, this site is not directed at you.

Third-party names and logos

tastytrade, Robinhood, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, E*TRADE, Webull, Interactive Brokers, Tradier, TradeStation, SnapTrade, DXFeed and Polygon are trademarks of their respective owners. We use their names and marks only to identify the brokerages OptionsX connects to and the vendors it relies on.

None of these companies sponsors, endorses, certifies or is affiliated with OptionsX. None has reviewed it, and none is responsible for anything OptionsX does or says. tastytrade's role is limited to being the broker at which you hold your own account and through which your own orders execute.

Changes to this page, and how to reach us

We update this page when the product changes. The date at the top is the last time we did. Material changes are also surfaced inside the application.

Questions about anything here, or a request for the documentation behind a figure: legal@optionsx.markets.

This page is a plain-language description of what OptionsX does and what can go wrong. It is not legal advice, and it does not modify your agreement with your broker.