OTM% at Entry: The Metric Your Broker Doesn't Show You

Your broker records a lot about every options trade you make: the date, the symbol, the strike, the fill price, the commission. What it doesn’t record — and what almost no trader manually tracks — is how far out of the money you were at the moment you entered.

OTM% at entry is one of the most revealing metrics in premium selling. It quantifies one of the central decisions in every trade: how much room did you give yourself?

What OTM% Means

Out-of-the-money percentage at entry is the distance between your strike price and the underlying’s price at the moment you opened the position, expressed as a percentage of the underlying price.

For a cash-secured put: OTM% = (Underlying Price − Strike Price) / Underlying Price × 100

For a covered call: OTM% = (Strike Price − Underlying Price) / Underlying Price × 100

A cash-secured put on SPY at strike $440 when SPY trades at $460: OTM% = (460 − 440) / 460 = 4.35%

A covered call on SHOP at strike $110 when SHOP trades at $95: OTM% = (110 − 95) / 95 = 15.8%

The first trade gives SPY 4.35% room to fall before your short put is tested. The second gives SHOP 15.8% room to rise before your covered call is threatened.

Why Delta Isn’t Enough

Most options traders use delta as a proxy for “how far OTM am I?” A 0.30 delta put is roughly 30% likely to finish in the money at expiration. It’s also a certain distance OTM in percentage terms — roughly 3–6% for most underlyings at 30–45 DTE.

The problem: delta changes constantly, and it conflates two different questions.

Distance question: How far is the underlying from my strike right now?

Probability question: What’s the likelihood my option finishes in the money?

These questions have the same answer at entry — delta tells you both simultaneously. But they diverge rapidly as the position ages. A 30-delta put at entry might be a 50-delta put two weeks later if the underlying has fallen 3%.

For historical analysis of your entries, what you want to know is: what percentage OTM was I at the moment I opened the position? Delta at entry doesn’t survive in your broker’s records. OTM% can be calculated — if you have the underlying price at your entry date.

The Broker Blind Spot

Here’s what your broker records when you execute an options trade:

• Date and time of fill
• Option symbol (which encodes strike, expiry, call/put type)
• Fill price (premium received or paid)
• Commission and account impact

What it does not record:

• The underlying price at your fill time
• Your OTM% at entry
• Your IV rank at entry
• Your effective DTE at entry (derivable from the symbol, but not surfaced in analytics)

The underlying price at your entry moment — the single piece of information you need to calculate OTM% — is not stored. It’s gone once the market day ends. If you don’t capture it at the time of entry or shortly after, it has to be approximated from historical data.

What Your OTM% Pattern Reveals

After tracking 30+ trades with OTM% at entry captured, you can start asking questions that actually improve your trading:

Is your OTM% consistent with your stated strategy?

If you tell yourself you’re a conservative premium seller who gives the underlying “plenty of room,” but your average OTM% across 60 trades is 2.1%, the data contradicts your self-image. Traders are systematically more aggressive in practice than they think they are. The discomfort of low premium leads to strike creep — incrementally tighter entries that don’t register as a change in approach until the data shows it.

Does your win rate vary meaningfully across OTM ranges?

Narrow OTM% (< 3%): High premium, tight setup, higher assignment or breach risk. Medium OTM% (3–8%): The core zone for most income-focused sellers. Wide OTM% (> 8%): Low premium per contract, but low probability of being tested.

Your data might show that your medium-OTM entries win 80% of the time while your narrow-OTM entries win 55%. That asymmetry is worth knowing. Or it might show no difference — in which case you should optimize for premium collected rather than distance.

How does OTM% interact with IV rank?

Selling at OTM% = 5% when IV rank is 30 is a very different trade than the same OTM% when IV rank is 70. At low IV, a 5% OTM setup might offer thin premium and inadequate buffer. At high IV, the same geometric distance might come with double the premium and wider expected moves already priced in.

OTM% alone doesn’t tell the full story. Its value compounds when analyzed in combination with IV rank at entry — which is exactly why capturing both metrics on the same trade matters.

The Strike Creep Problem

One of the most common and damaging patterns in premium selling is gradual strike creep: over weeks and months, you unconsciously tighten your OTM% at entry because the market is quiet, the wider strikes aren’t paying enough, and each incremental adjustment seems small in isolation.

You go from entering at 6% OTM to 5% to 4% to 3.5%. None of these individual changes felt significant. The cumulative change doubled your breach risk.

Without tracking OTM% systematically, strike creep is invisible. With a rolling chart of your OTM% at entry over time, the drift becomes obvious — and correctable.

Capturing OTM% Without Manual Work

The friction of capturing OTM% manually is what stops most traders from tracking it. You’d need to look up the underlying price at your entry time, then calculate the distance, then log both numbers — for every trade, consistently.

StrikeRate automates this. When you log a trade with your entry date, the platform pulls the underlying’s closing price for that date and calculates OTM% automatically. The value is attached to the trade and never changes.

For Questrade users, the import handles this entirely. Your entry dates come from the API, and OTM% is calculated for every trade in your imported history — giving you 6 months of data immediately with no manual work.

Getting Started

Track your OTM% automatically — start free on StrikeRate. Questrade import is available with Pro. Manual entry works for any broker.

After 20–30 trades, your OTM% distribution will start to show patterns. After 60, you’ll have enough data to distinguish signal from noise — and to start making deliberate decisions about how much room you’re giving yourself on every entry.