The Wheel Report

What the wheel strategy actually does, measured on real broker fills rather than backtests.

Lead finding

Most wheel positions never become a wheel.

Across more than 2,600 cash-secured put cycles tracked on PremiumGuardHQ, roughly one in five ended in assignment. The other four expired or were closed before the shares ever arrived.

The strategy is named for the part that happens least.

Assigned Expired or closed

Each dot is one percent of the 2,634 put cycles tracked. 530 reached assignment.

The dataset

Every figure below is computed from broker fills reconciled by the platform, not from surveys, model portfolios, or backtests.

$125.4M: Options notional opened Cumulative across every opening options position
14,572: Trades reconciled Options and equity legs
3,029: Cycles detected Every cycle type
530: Complete wheel cycles Put assigned, shares held, calls written

Accounts tracked on PremiumGuardHQ, with trade history reaching back to March 2021. Test accounts are excluded.

01 Behavior

Assignment is the exception, not the rhythm.

The wheel is usually taught as a loop. Sell a cash-secured put, take assignment, write calls against the shares, get called away, start again. In the cycles tracked on PremiumGuardHQ, that full loop completed 530 times. Over the same history, 2,104 put cycles closed without the trader ever taking delivery.

530 Reached assignment

2,104 Expired or closed first

That reframes what the strategy actually asks of an operator. Most of the work is underwriting a risk that never converts into stock, while the collateral sits committed the whole time. The assignment that does arrive is the event worth preparing for, and it is rarer than the name suggests.

02 Concentration

The income desk is not buying blue chips.

Ranked by premium collected, these five tickers produced the most options income on the platform. Not one is a mega-cap dividend payer. The list runs to lower-priced, higher volatility names, where premium per dollar of collateral is richest and a share assignment is cheapest to absorb.

Premium collected by symbol, full tracked history
Symbol	Premium collected	Win rate	Cycles
RIVN	$92,297	93.1%	78
CCL	$58,584	88.7%	61
AAL	$45,441	89.1%	63
SLV	$35,134	85.2%	34
PLTR	$22,101	78.8%	36

Win rate counts cycles closed at or above breakeven, so it measures how often a position finished whole, not how much it made. A symbol appears here only when its aggregate covers at least five distinct traders.

Methodology

Every figure here is computed by the same engine that runs the product. The full calculation reference, formula by formula, is published at Methodology.

A cycle: One complete position, detected from broker fills rather than declared by the trader. A wheel cycle runs from an assigned put through the shares and any calls written against them, until the position is flat again.
Premium collected: Option cash flow. Credits taken in from contracts sold, less the debits paid to close them. Buying a position back for more than it sold for reduces the figure.
Win rate: The share of closed cycles that finished at or above breakeven. It measures how often a position finished whole, not how much it made.
Assignment rate: Completed wheel cycles as a share of all put-driven cycles. Standalone long-option positions are excluded from the denominator.
Population: Accounts tracked on PremiumGuardHQ, with test accounts excluded throughout. Per-symbol figures cover broker-synced accounts, where the fills arrive from the brokerage rather than a file.

How this data is handled

These are aggregates, computed inside our own database across many accounts. They are never tied to a name, an email, or an account, and they never include an individual trade, position, or balance. No statistic is published unless it covers at least five distinct traders, so no figure on this page can be traced back to any one person. That floor is written into our terms, not just our practice.

Read the privacy policy

Cite this report Figures as of 25 August 2026

PremiumGuardHQ, "The Wheel Report," August 2026. https://premiumguardhq.com/research/wheel-report

Figures may be reproduced with attribution to PremiumGuardHQ and a link to this page.

› 14-day free trial · no credit card

Your own numbers, same engine.

This report is what the platform sees across every account it tracks. Connect a broker and it runs the same detection on your fills: every cycle found, every assignment reconciled, premium and capital at risk kept honest.

Start your 14-day free trial

Schwab · IBKR · Robinhood · Fidelity · tastytrade
Full history backfilled
Read-only broker access
Cancel anytime