If you're running the wheel strategy, you need to track your positions. A spreadsheet is the most common starting point — and it works well enough until it doesn't. Here's a free one to get you started, what it tracks, and where it breaks down when you start scaling.
The Free Wheel Strategy Spreadsheet
No email required. No signup wall. Just make a copy and use it.
→ Click here to get the free Wheel Strategy Spreadsheet (Google Sheets)
Make a copy by going to File → Make a Copy in Google Sheets. It's yours to edit however you want.
What It Tracks and How to Use It
The spreadsheet is designed around the two legs of the wheel — the cash secured put entry and the covered call phase if you get assigned. Each row is one position. Here's what each column tracks:
Ticker — the stock you're trading the wheel on.
Type — CSP (cash secured put) or CC (covered call), depending on which leg you're in.
Strike — the strike price of the option you sold.
Expiration — the expiration date of the contract.
DTE at Entry — days to expiration when you opened the position. Useful for reviewing your DTE patterns over time.
Premium Collected — the credit you received when you sold the contract. Per share, so multiply by 100 for the full dollar amount.
Cost Basis — your original cost basis on the shares (for the covered call leg) or your effective purchase price if assigned on the put.
Adjusted Cost Basis — cost basis minus all premium collected so far. This is the number that matters — it shows your real break-even after accounting for every dollar of premium you've collected on this position.
Assignment Status — Yes or No. Did the option expire worthless or were you assigned?
Notes — anything worth remembering about the trade — why you picked this strike, what the market was doing, what you'd do differently.
The Notes column is underrated. Six months from now you'll want to know why you took a trade, not just what it was. Write it down at the time.
Where Spreadsheets Break Down
A spreadsheet is a record of what you've done. It's not a tool for figuring out what to do next. That distinction matters more than most people realize when they start using one.
You're running multiple positions simultaneously. The wheel works best when you're running it across several tickers — diversifying your assignment risk and your premium sources. Five positions is manageable in a spreadsheet. Fifteen starts to get unwieldy. Twenty and you're spending more time updating rows than thinking about trades.
Earnings dates change. You opened a position thinking earnings were safely outside your expiration. Then the company moved their earnings date by two weeks and now they fall inside your window. Your spreadsheet doesn't know this happened. You have to check manually, ticker by ticker, every time something changes in the calendar.
IV shifts affect your open positions differently. When volatility spikes or compresses, some of your positions are affected more than others depending on their DTE, moneyness, and the specific stock's IV behavior. A spreadsheet shows you your static entry data — it can't tell you which of your open positions is now at risk given current market conditions.
It doesn't tell you what to sell next. This is the biggest limitation. After you close a position or get assigned, your next job is finding the next trade. That means scanning across thousands of tickers for contracts where the probability is high, the IV is elevated, the earnings date is clear, and the premium is worth the capital at risk. That is not a spreadsheet problem. That's a scanning problem.
The Part Spreadsheets Can't Do
Finding the next trade is the actual job. Everything else is record-keeping.
The wheel works as an income strategy because you're continuously deploying capital — closing positions that expired worthless, finding new puts to sell, managing assignments into covered calls, repeating. The alpha isn't in the tracking. It's in finding the right contract at the right time.
That means knowing which tickers currently have elevated IV rank — so you're selling premium when it's actually expensive. It means knowing which expirations are clear of earnings dates for every ticker you're considering. It means being able to compare historical probability of expiring worthless across dozens of contracts simultaneously, not just checking one chain at a time.
Manually scanning for all of this across 5,000+ tickers takes hours. And by the time you've done it, the data has changed.
What I Built Instead
When I was running the wheel seriously, I had the same spreadsheet problem. I could track what I owned. I couldn't find what to buy next without spending most of my morning checking chains one ticker at a time.
The same brain that I used to scan for mispriced textbooks on Amazon — checking which books were listed low, which had high resale value, which were worth buying and flipping — I applied to options. The setup was identical: I needed to scan a large universe of assets, filter by specific criteria, and find the ones where the math favored my side of the trade.
That's what StrikeScan does. It scans 60,000+ live contracts every 15 minutes, calculates historical and Monte Carlo probability on every strike, flags earnings and dividends, and ranks setups by a composite score that weights probability, annualized ROI, and DTE. Instead of spending an hour hunting for the next wheel trade, I have a shortlist in seconds.
It's free while it's in beta. No credit card, no commitment.
Use Both — They're Not Either/Or
The spreadsheet and the scanner serve different purposes. They work together, not in competition.
Use the spreadsheet to track what you own — your cost basis, your premium collected, your adjusted break-even on each position. That history is yours and it's valuable. Reviewing it over time tells you which setups have worked, which strikes you should have avoided, and how your actual realized returns compare to what you expected when you entered.
Use StrikeScan to find what goes in the spreadsheet next. When a position closes and you have capital to redeploy, open the scanner, filter for the criteria that match your strategy, and work from the ranked results. The decision is still yours — the scanner just makes sure you're not missing the best setups because you weren't looking at the right tickers.
The spreadsheet handles your history. The scanner handles your next trade. Together they cover the full workflow.
Disclosure: I am the founder of StrikeScan, the platform referenced in this article. This is not financial advice.