Why Strike Wise exists.
Options are the most misunderstood instrument in retail trading. Brokerages happily approve them for first-time traders behind a click-wrap, but the language (strikes, expirations, theta, IV crush) keeps the math behind a wall. The result is people losing money on bets they didn't actually understand.
Strike Wise translates options into the same plain English a friend would use. Not gambling tips, not "this contract goes to the moon."Just an honest read of what each contract costs, what has to happen for it to pay, and how much you stand to lose if it doesn't.
What's here today
Paper trading, early access. A practice account loaded with $10,000. Buy real contracts at real prices, hold them, watch them move through the trading day, and exit when you choose — without risking a dollar. Two things make it different from every other simulator:
The fills are honest.You buy at the ask and sell at the bid, with a spread modeled on each contract's liquidity, because the spread is a real cost of trading, and simulators that fill you at the mid teach you fills you'll never get with real money. Every fill is labeled as simulated, every time.
Every position explains itself.Your portfolio doesn't just show green and red numbers. Each holding tells you what has to happen by when, what time decay is costing you per day, and why you're up or down — the same plain-English translation, applied to contracts you actually hold. Long calls and puts for now; selling strategies (CSPs, covered calls) and multi-leg come later.
A primer. Calls, puts, strikes, expirations, the Greeks, breakeven, IV, time decay. Each concept written as the math you'd actually need, with embedded interactives, a 20-card flashcard recap, and a separate Anatomy diagram showing one SPY contract laid out three ways across mobile, desktop, and an order ticket. Start at /learn.
A live translator. Find a Contract takes your ticker, direction, target price, and target date, then surfaces five live contracts that would pay if your prediction comes true (plus one cheap lottery for overshoot bets). Translate a Contract lets you drop in a specific contract you're considering and read what each Greek means in dollars, where breakeven sits, and a price-by-time heatmap of the P&L at every realistic outcome. Open it at /translate.
How the numbers work
Greeks are computed from an implied volatility calibrated to each contract's actual market price. We solve for the IV that reprices the contract to its live premium, then derive delta, theta, and the rest from that single calibrated number. That calibrated IV is the primary source, not a vendor's pre-computed figure, so every figure on the card is internally consistent.
Your positions are marked the same way, and they keep moving between trades. A thinly traded contract only prints a new price every so often, which would freeze its value even as the stock moves. So we hold the calibrated IV from its last print and reprice the contract off the live underlying, so a position's value tracks the market instead of going stale between its own trades. Fills follow the same model: you buy at the ask and sell at the bid, with a spread modeled around that live theoretical price, and every fill records exactly how it was priced.
Pricing runs on a delay, with the underlying implied from the options chain itself rather than a separate stock feed. Prices update through the trading day but run about 15 minutes behind the live market, so they'll lag what your broker app shows. Real-time data is coming soon. A banner above every result says the same.
This is deliberate for now. Strike Wise is for learning the mechanics that actually lose beginners money, not for scalping ticks. Real-time data arrives with the paid tier.
What's coming
Plain-English post-mortems. The next build: when you close a position, you'll get more than a P&L number. You'll read what actually happened, whether you were right on direction but wrong on timing, whether time decay ate the gain, whether IV moved against you. "Why did my contract die" will have an answer, computed from your actual entry and exit.
Beyond that: shareable contract URLs, scenario explorers ("what if IV drops 20%?"), selling strategies, multi-leg, and per-ticker IV history. If there's something specific you'd find useful, tell us.
What it isn't
Strike Wise is not a brokerage. It's not a recommendation engine. It will never tell you to take a trade. It exists so that if you decide to trade options, you do it with a real understanding of the math, not a gut feeling and a meme.