I manage a portfolio of about 15 equity positions. Every week I need to know the same thing: which positions have call opportunities worth selling today, at what strike, and for how much?
It sounds simple. It's not.
The options chain for a single ticker can have hundreds of rows — different expirations, different strikes, weekly and monthly. Multiply that across 15 positions and you're looking at thousands of rows of noise before you find the two or three contracts actually worth writing. And the generic screeners, the ones that were built for directional options traders, are nearly useless for this workflow.
This is a comparison of every covered call screener I've tested seriously. I'll tell you what each one does well, where it falls short, and which one I actually use.
What a Covered Call Screener Actually Needs
Before the comparison, here's my checklist. These are the things that matter for a covered call income workflow — not for a day trader hunting IV spikes.
Portfolio-aware filtering. The screener should know what I own and screen only those tickers. I don't want to screen the S&P 500 for calls — I want to screen my 15 positions.
Yield on cost basis. Premium yield calculated against the price I actually paid for the shares, not the current price. This is the number that matters for income planning. If I bought AAPL at $140 and it's now trading at $200, my yield should reflect my cost, not the market price.
Delta and DTE controls. I target 0.15–0.25 delta and 21–45 DTE on most positions. A screener that can't filter by these parameters is going to drown me in irrelevant strikes.
Earnings and dividend flags. Selling a covered call through an earnings announcement is one of the most common mistakes new CC sellers make. A good screener flags this automatically.
Broker integration. The end goal is routing a sell-to-open order. Having to manually re-enter a contract in my broker after finding it in a screener is a friction point that compounds across 15 positions.
The Screeners
Barchart
Barchart's covered call screener (barchart.com) is probably the most widely used free tool for this. You can filter by moneyness, expiration, premium, and implied volatility. The data quality is solid.
The problem: it's built around the idea that you're prospecting for new positions, not managing existing ones. You can't import your portfolio. Every session starts with a blank slate. If you own AAPL, NVDA, MSFT, and 12 other tickers, you're going to be manually plugging each one in, session after session.
It also shows premiums at mid, not bid. Sellers receive the bid. The difference is usually small but it matters when you're making decisions at the margin.
Best for: Scanning for opportunities on stocks you're considering adding to your portfolio. Not for managing a portfolio you already own.
MarketChameleon
MarketChameleon (marketchameleon.com) is the best free covered call research tool I've found. The option chain views are excellent — IV rank, historical IV percentile, earnings dates, ex-dividend dates, all cleanly displayed. The covered call calculator shows annualized yield, break-even, and probability data.
For a power user who's willing to pull up each ticker manually and run the numbers, this is genuinely excellent. The data is comprehensive and accurate.
Where it falls short: same portfolio problem as Barchart. No way to connect your brokerage, no batch view across positions, no way to pre-filter by "tickers I actually own." You're doing each one by hand.
Best for: Deep research on a single ticker. If you own three or four positions and don't mind doing them one at a time, this might be all you need.
OptionStrat
OptionStrat (optionstrat.com) is beautifully designed and excellent at what it does: visualizing multi-leg options strategies. The P&L diagram, the probability of profit visualization, the Greeks breakdown — all top-notch.
But OptionStrat is built for leg-by-leg strategy construction, not for covered call screening. It doesn't have a batch screener. You find it useful when you already know what contract you want to analyze, not when you're trying to discover what to sell this week.
Best for: Analyzing a specific contract you've already identified. Poor fit for a screening workflow.
Option Alpha
Option Alpha (optionalpha.com) is a strategy automation platform that has grown into something more like a trading bot than a screener. The backtesting tools are genuinely good. The educational content is the best in the industry — their studies on delta selection and position sizing are frequently cited and rigorous.
For screening, it's overkill and the wrong model. Option Alpha is designed around mechanical, rules-based strategy automation. That's valuable if you want to set rules and let the platform execute — but it's not a portfolio screener in the traditional sense, and the pricing (starting around $99/month for meaningful features) reflects a different use case than what I need.
Best for: Systematic traders who want to automate rule-based covered call strategies. Not for manual portfolio management.
OptionsPilot
OptionsPilot (optionspilot.com) uses AI to generate trade suggestions. The interface is clean. The suggestions are plausible.
My concern with this category of tool is opacity. When a platform tells me "this is a good trade," I need to understand why — what delta, what DTE, what the yield on my cost basis is, what the earnings situation looks like. When the answer is "our algorithm recommends it," that's not actionable information for my workflow. I need the underlying numbers.
Best for: Investors who want suggestions without doing their own analysis. Not for practitioners who need to understand the math.
Power E*TRADE and Schwab StreetSmart Edge
Both of these are in-broker tools that have reasonably good covered call screens. Schwab's is particularly solid — you can filter by covered call return, premium, and delta directly from StreetSmart Edge. If Schwab is your only broker, this might be sufficient.
The limitation is obvious: these tools only see your positions at that one broker. If you have accounts at multiple institutions — which is common among serious retail investors — you can't get a unified cross-portfolio view. You're running the screen separately at each broker.
Best for: Investors with a single brokerage account at Schwab or E*TRADE who want a free, adequate solution.
Myron
I built Myron because none of the above solved my actual problem. Here's what it does differently.
It starts with your portfolio. Connect your brokerage via SnapTrade and Myron imports your positions. Every screen is filtered to tickers you actually own — no noise from stocks you have no position in.
Yield is calculated on your cost basis. If I bought MSFT at $280 and it's now $410, the yield I see in Myron reflects the $280. This is the metric that actually tells me whether a covered call is worth selling against my position.
Earnings and ex-dividend flags are automatic. If there's an earnings announcement within the expiration window, Myron flags it in the screener. Same for ex-dividend dates. These are the two most common ways to accidentally get into trouble with covered calls.
Delta and DTE filters match how practitioners actually think. My default setup: 0.20 delta, 30–45 DTE. Myron surfaces only the contracts that match those parameters. I see a short list of actual opportunities, not a wall of noise.
The broker connection works both ways. Once I've decided to write a call, I can route the order back to my broker through SnapTrade. No manual re-entry.
Myron is not perfect. It doesn't have an iOS app. The option chain visualization isn't as rich as OptionStrat's. For deep per-contract analysis — IV percentile charts, detailed Greeks — MarketChameleon is still more thorough. And Myron has a cost: it's free for portfolios up to $25K, and $24/month for larger accounts.
The Honest Verdict
Here's how I'd actually direct different types of investors:
One broker account, smaller portfolio, want free: Use MarketChameleon for research and your broker's built-in screen for discovery. Do each position manually. This works fine if you have 3–5 positions.
Multiple positions, multiple accounts, serious about income: Use Myron. The portfolio-aware screening across all positions is the feature that doesn't exist anywhere else at this price point. The time savings compound fast when you're managing 10–15 positions.
Deep research on a single name: MarketChameleon, full stop. It has the richest data of any free tool for per-contract analysis.
Already use Schwab exclusively: StreetSmart Edge is fine. Don't pay for a screener if your broker gives you one that's adequate.
The gap that no existing tool addressed — and why I built Myron — is the portfolio-first workflow: here are the positions I own, screen the options chain on each one for contracts that match my targets, show me the yield on my cost basis, flag the earnings and ex-div risk, and help me route the order. That's the workflow. Everything else is noise.