About
PutWatch exists because finding a decent put to sell should not take an hour every morning, and because most of the tools that promise to shorten that hour will not tell you how they work.
Why it exists
Selling cash-secured puts is not a hard strategy to understand. It is a tedious one to run. There are several hundred names liquid enough to be worth a look, the interesting ones change daily, and the work of checking volume, open interest, spread, implied volatility against what the stock has actually done, and whether earnings falls inside the window is the same work every single morning.
A computer should do that. What a computer should not do is decide which of the survivors belongs in your account, because it does not know your account, your taxes, or how you would feel about being assigned. So PutWatch narrows the field and stops.
Why the model is published
Most screeners are a black box with a confident number on the front. The number is the product, and you are expected to trust it because trusting it is the only option available to you.
Every gate, factor, weight and curve PutWatch uses is on the methodology page, and that page is generated from the same code the scan runs on, so it cannot drift from what actually happened. You can recompute a published score by hand. If you disagree with a weight, you can see exactly which weight you disagree with.
Why the losses are published
Every pick PutWatch publishes is opened as a paper position and closed by fixed rules, whatever happens to it. Nothing is removed for looking bad. The track record shows the win rate, the average return, the days held and the worst single trade at the same size as each other.
A record that shows only the good days is not evidence of anything, and a product whose pitch is transparency cannot be selective about which numbers it is transparent with.
Three things it will not do
It will not place a trade. PutWatch connects to no brokerage, asks for no brokerage credentials, and can see no balance, position or order. You enter every order yourself.
It will not tell you what to buy. It reports what its rules scored highest. That is a different sentence, and the difference is the whole product.
It will not promise a return. Selling options can lose more than the premium received, and no published figure here is a forecast of anything.
PutWatch publishes research and education. It is not an investment adviser or a broker-dealer. See the disclaimer.