Covered calls are an income strategy, and income strategies live or die on the quality of the candidates you find. Selling a covered call on the wrong stock at the wrong implied volatility level against the wrong expiration does not generate income. It generates a capped position in a name that moves against you. Finding the right trade requires screening across thousands of underlying stocks simultaneously, filtering by IV rank, premium level, delta, expiration, earnings proximity, and return on capital, and doing that consistently before the premium decays.
Most options scanners are not built for this. Flow scanners surface what institutions are buying right now. GEX platforms show dealer hedging positioning. Neither helps an income trader find the best covered call candidates across the market on a given Tuesday morning. The four platforms below do.
Quick-Reference Comparison
| Platform | Covered Call Screener | Strategy Count | Data Speed | Free Access | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market Chameleon | Dedicated screener | 18+ strategies | 15-min delay | Yes (Starter) | Earnings-focused income traders |
| Option Samurai | Dedicated screener | 24 strategies | EOD (Basic) / Intraday (Advanced) | 14-day trial, no card | Strategy-first screener users |
| OptionStrat | Builder + optimizer | 50+ strategies | Real-time (paid) | Yes (Free tier) | Strategy visualization and selection |
| ORATS | Scanner with IV depth | Backtester + scanner | Real-time (included) | No | Systematic traders, IV-focused writers |
1. Market Chameleon
Market Chameleon is the most complete research environment for covered call writers among the four platforms reviewed here. The covered call screener is a named, dedicated tool within the platform’s screener suite, sitting alongside 18 distinct strategy types including cash-secured puts, vertical spreads in all four directions, calendar spreads, iron condors, butterflies, and straddles. The fact that it is explicitly named rather than implied matters. The filter set is built around what a covered call writer actually needs to evaluate: premium level, expiration, moneyness, IV rank versus historical, and distance from earnings.
The earnings analysis infrastructure is what separates Market Chameleon from every other screener in this list for income traders who write calls around earnings. For any stock in the database, the platform shows how implied volatility has behaved historically in the weeks leading into earnings, how far the stock actually moved versus what IV implied it would move, and how specific options strategies have performed across prior earnings cycles using real historical data. A covered call writer can look at a candidate stock and see not just what IV rank looks like today but whether that IV tends to collapse before or after the event, and by how much. That context is the difference between selling premium at the right moment and selling it just before it expands further.
The screener covers 3,500+ US stocks and ETFs. All data carries a 15-minute delay, disclosed clearly on every page. A Starter tier is free with no credit card required, providing enough access to evaluate the screener’s data quality and filtering capability before subscribing. Total Access is $99/month or negotiated annually via email to support.
What covered call writers specifically get: A dedicated covered call screener with IV-based filtering, a backtester showing how specific strategy parameters have performed historically for any ticker across prior earnings cycles, term structure visualization showing how IV behaves across expirations, and a Fixed Strike Matrix surfacing IV levels across all strikes and expirations simultaneously.
The real limitation: The 15-minute data delay rules out same-session premium capture decisions. Traders who need to act on a premium spike intraday will find the delay frustrating. Market Chameleon is a research tool for traders who identify candidates the night before or in pre-market, not a real-time execution aid.
Read the full Market Chameleon review
2. Option Samurai
Option Samurai is built from the premise that most traders have a strategy first and need to find the best current implementation of it across the market. Covered calls are one of 24 supported strategies in the screener, which means the platform was designed with income traders in mind from the beginning rather than retrofitted to accommodate them.
The screener covers 170 filters across stock fundamentals, technical indicators, IV data, earnings proximity, dividend schedules, premium level, delta, return on capital, and strategy-specific risk parameters. For covered call writers, the combination of IV rank and IV percentile filtering alongside dividend calendar data is particularly useful. High-IV candidates near ex-dividend dates represent a specific risk. The filter set surfaces those conflicts before they become positions.
The Stock Analyzer is worth naming separately. A trader inputs a stock and a directional view, and the platform returns the best strategy structure for that scenario ranked by return and probability of profit. For a trader who has already identified a covered call candidate but is unsure of the optimal strike and expiration given current IV conditions, the Stock Analyzer replaces the manual work of comparing individual contracts one by one.
The Custom Strategy Scanner, launched Q2 2025, extended the screener to support any multi-leg structure up to 5 legs on the Advanced plan. For traders who run buy-write variations with collars, or who layer protective puts onto covered call positions, this matters. The screener handles non-standard structures, not just the 24 preset templates.
The 14-day free trial with no credit card required is the most accessible entry point of any platform on this list. The Beginner plan at $35/month annually uses end-of-day data, which is sufficient for overnight candidate identification. The Advanced plan at $50/month annually adds intraday data and scan-watching alerts. Both are meaningfully cheaper than Market Chameleon’s Total Access tier.
What covered call writers specifically get: A dedicated covered call screener with 170 filters, a Stock Analyzer that surfaces optimal strike and expiration selection given a view, the Custom Strategy Scanner for non-standard structures, intraday scan alerts on Advanced, and predefined covered call scan templates as starting points.
The real limitation: End-of-day data on the Beginner plan means the screener is not useful for mid-session premium capture. The Advanced plan resolves this, but at $50/month annually it is still priced for deliberate, research-oriented traders rather than traders who need live scanning throughout the session.
Read the full Option Samurai review
3. OptionStrat
OptionStrat approaches covered calls differently from the other three platforms here. It is not primarily a screener that scans the market for candidates matching your criteria. It is a strategy builder and optimizer that helps traders understand, compare, and select the right structure once they have a candidate in mind. Covered calls are listed as a Novice strategy in the builder, which reflects how the platform organizes its 50+ supported strategies by complexity.
The builder visualizes the profit and loss profile of any covered call position interactively, using live OPRA data. Adjust the strike, expiration, or number of contracts and the P&L curve updates in real time. The platform shows probability of profit, breakeven price, maximum gain, and maximum loss at a glance. For traders who want to understand what they are actually committing to before placing a trade, this visualization layer is more useful than a raw screener result that shows only the premium without context.
The Optimizer is where OptionStrat becomes genuinely useful for systematic covered call writers. A trader inputs a stock, a directional view, and a target timeframe, and the Optimizer scans thousands of potential covered call positions across strikes and expirations simultaneously, ranking results by return or probability of profit. Finding the best strike and expiration for a specific view is a search problem. The Optimizer automates it.
The flow feed on Live Flow includes multi-leg strategy detection, which means covered calls placed as part of a larger institutional position appear as recognizable structures rather than as fragmented individual legs. For traders who want to see where large covered call positions are being established before entering their own, this is a secondary research tool alongside the builder.
At $39.99/month for Live Tools and $99.99/month for Live Flow, OptionStrat sits in the middle of the pricing range. The Free tier provides access to the builder with delayed data, which is sufficient to evaluate the P&L visualization and strategy selection tools before subscribing. Annual pricing saves 12%.
What covered call writers specifically get: Interactive P&L visualization with live pricing, an Optimizer that scans strikes and expirations to find the highest-return or highest-probability covered call for any target timeframe, institutional flow detection showing where large covered call positions are being placed, and Congress and insider trade data alongside the flow feed for context.
The real limitation: OptionStrat is a selection and visualization tool, not a market-wide screener. It does not scan thousands of stocks simultaneously to surface which names have the best covered call setups today. A trader needs to arrive with a candidate already in mind. For traders who need the market-wide scan first, Market Chameleon or Option Samurai is the better starting point, with OptionStrat used for final position sizing and strike selection.
Read the full OptionStrat review
4. ORATS
ORATS is not marketed as a covered call screener. It should be considered by any serious covered call writer anyway. The platform was built by Matt Amberson, a former CBOE market maker, using methodology developed for professional options market making. That background produces something no consumer-grade screener offers: proprietary implied volatility infrastructure that goes substantially deeper than IV rank and IV percentile.
The specific tools that matter for covered call writers are earnings-adjusted IV, forecasted IV surfaces, and the Smoothed Market Values (SMV) system. Standard IV rank measures where current IV sits relative to its 52-week range. That is useful but incomplete. A stock can sit at the 80th percentile of its annual IV range the week before earnings simply because earnings is approaching, not because there is any structural premium opportunity worth capturing. ORATS’s earnings-adjusted IV strips the earnings component out, showing what IV would be without the event premium. For a covered call writer deciding whether to sell calls before or after an earnings announcement, that distinction is the entire decision.
The Stock Scanner covers 5,000+ stocks and ETFs with 700+ proprietary options indicators and 22 fundamental indicators available as filter conditions. The Strategy Optimizer runs 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations to validate that any improvement found through optimization is statistically significant rather than a product of overfitting to historical noise. The backtester provides access to 300 million pre-calculated results using real historical data back to 2007 across more than 5,000 symbols. A covered call writer can test a specific selection methodology, for example selling 30-delta calls 21 days to expiration on stocks with IV rank above 50, against 16+ years of real data before committing capital to it.
All of this is included in a single all-access subscription at $99/month. Real-time data is included. Broker execution connects directly to Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, and Tradier. There is no tier hierarchy to navigate.
What covered call writers specifically get: Earnings-adjusted IV that removes event premium from the IV rank reading, forecasted IV surfaces showing where IV is likely to go rather than just where it has been, the Strategy Optimizer for strike and expiration selection with Monte Carlo validation, a backtester with 300 million pre-calculated results for methodology testing, and a Stock Scanner with 700+ indicators for candidate identification.
The real limitation: ORATS has a learning curve that is steeper than the other three platforms here. The SMV system, the forecasted IV surfaces, and the Monte Carlo Optimizer all require time to understand before they are useful. Traders who want to run a covered call screener and get results in five minutes will find the interface dense. Traders willing to invest time in the methodology will find it the most analytically defensible tool in the category.
Which Platform Fits Your Approach
The right covered call screener depends on two variables: how you find candidates, and how much you need to understand about IV before pulling the trigger.
For traders who start by scanning the market for the best premium opportunities: Market Chameleon or Option Samurai. Market Chameleon’s dedicated screener with earnings backtesting is stronger for traders who write calls around scheduled events. Option Samurai’s 170 filters and 14-day free trial with no card required make it the better starting point for traders who want to evaluate before committing.
For traders who start with a stock they already own and want to find the best call to sell: OptionStrat. The Optimizer solves this problem directly. Input the stock and a view, and it returns the highest-probability or highest-return covered call across all available strikes and expirations.
For traders who run systematic strategies and want to validate methodology before deploying capital: ORATS. The backtester, the earnings-adjusted IV, and the Monte Carlo Optimizer make it the only platform in this group capable of answering whether a specific covered call selection rule has historically generated edge.
All four platforms can be evaluated before spending full subscription money. Market Chameleon has a free Starter tier. Option Samurai has a 14-day trial with no credit card. OptionStrat has a free tier with delayed data. ORATS does not offer a trial, but the $99/month all-access pricing means there is no tier to upgrade through once subscribed.
FAQ
What should a covered call screener actually filter for?
The most useful covered call screeners filter by IV rank or IV percentile (to identify elevated premium), days to expiration (to match the intended holding period), delta of the call being sold (to control the probability of assignment), earnings proximity (to avoid or target event premium depending on strategy), return on capital (to compare opportunities on a normalized basis), and stock price range (to match position sizing constraints). Screeners that show only available strikes without surfacing these contextual factors require the trader to do the analysis manually after identifying candidates, which defeats much of the purpose.
What is IV rank and why does it matter for covered calls?
IV rank measures where current implied volatility sits relative to its range over the past 52 weeks. A reading of 80 means IV is currently higher than 80% of the readings over the past year. For covered call writers, high IV rank is generally favorable because options premiums are elevated, meaning the call sold generates more income per share than the same strike would in a low-IV environment. Selling covered calls when IV rank is low produces thin premiums that may not compensate for the risk of holding the underlying. Most screeners in this category show IV rank. ORATS additionally provides earnings-adjusted IV rank and IV percentile, which are more precise measures for specific situations.
Should covered call writers avoid selling calls before earnings?
It depends on the strategy. Selling calls into an earnings event captures elevated event premium but exposes the position to a large directional move that can overwhelm the premium collected. Most income-focused covered call writers prefer to sell calls after earnings, when IV tends to collapse and the stock has already made its move. The risk is that post-earnings IV is lower, so the premium collected is smaller. Market Chameleon’s earnings backtester is the most useful tool in this category for traders who want to see historically how specific approaches have performed around earnings for individual stocks, rather than relying on general rules.
What is the difference between a covered call screener and an options strategy builder?
A screener scans the entire market simultaneously and returns a list of candidates matching your specified criteria. A strategy builder takes a specific candidate and helps you select the best structure and parameters for it. Market Chameleon and Option Samurai are primarily screeners. OptionStrat is primarily a builder and optimizer. ORATS functions as both, with a scanner for candidate identification and a strategy optimizer for parameter selection. Most serious covered call writers benefit from using a screener for candidate discovery and a builder or optimizer for final position construction, which is why combining two tools from this list is a common approach.
Is a 15-minute data delay acceptable for covered call screeners?
For most covered call writers, yes. Covered call selection is typically a pre-market or end-of-day research exercise, not an intraday decision made in response to a specific price move. The strategy involves selling calls on stocks already held in the portfolio, which changes slowly. A 15-minute delay on screening data does not meaningfully affect the quality of candidate identification when the decisions being made are about which call to sell next week, not which contract to sell in the next five minutes. The exception is traders who attempt to capture intraday IV spikes by selling calls into momentary elevated premium. For that approach, real-time data matters, and ORATS or OptionStrat are more appropriate.
Can I use these screeners without owning the underlying stock?
The screeners themselves work regardless of whether a position is held. Market Chameleon, Option Samurai, and ORATS all surface potential covered call candidates based on the options market data, independent of individual portfolio holdings. OptionStrat’s optimizer works the same way. Whether the resulting trade is structured as a traditional covered call (owning 100 shares per contract) or a cash-secured put (an equivalent synthetic position) is a separate portfolio decision. None of the platforms require portfolio integration to use the screening functionality.