How Collect52 actually picks trades

You now know what a cash-secured put and a covered call are, and how to read a backtest. Here's how those pieces actually come together inside the engine.

It starts with a broad scan

Each cycle, the engine scans 90+ tickers across sectors — leveraged ETFs, sector ETFs, mega cap tech, semiconductors, financials, energy, healthcare, consumer, and more — evaluating over 1,000 individual contracts once every strike and expiry is accounted for. Every contract is filtered for liquidity and contract quality before any scoring happens, so thin, hard-to-trade setups get screened out early.

Then a weighted score

What survives the scan gets scored by a weighted model covering delta alignment, rate of change, trend, pullback context, expected move, and implied volatility rank. Scoring runs across two separate tracks: one for leveraged and high-volatility assets focused on pure premium capture (cash-secured puts, mostly), and one for individual stocks where being assigned shares is genuinely acceptable (a natural fit for covered calls). The score is a relative ranking tool, not a guarantee — a higher score reflects a stronger historical pattern, not a predicted outcome.

Backtested numbers, kept honest

Every pick shows a backtested win rate — how a comparable contract would have performed under similar historical conditions, using the same win definition explained in reading a backtest. Collect52 tracks two different things and never blends them: a live pick is what the engine actually recommended in real time, logged the moment it was generated. A backtested pick is today's scoring logic run against historical data, so you can see how the current model would have performed before it existed.

Where you decide

The backtested statistics and our own conviction note are always shown as two separate things — the backtest is historical data, "our take" is judgment layered on top of it. Neither is personalized investment advice. The engine narrows 90+ tickers and 1,000+ contracts down to a short list with the reasoning shown — you decide what to do with it, and you execute your own trades, in your own brokerage, on your own decision.

See the full breakdown on our methodology page, or see our disclaimer for how we describe what we do.