Updated September 2026
Selling a cash-secured put means promising to buy 100 shares per contract at the strike price if it's assigned — so the cash you need to set aside is a fixed, simple number: strike price × 100 × number of contracts. Sell one $50 put and you need $5,000 set aside. Sell three contracts of a $35 put and it's $10,500. The math itself is trivial — the hard part is knowing your total across every put you've sold, in every account, at once.
Most "cash secured put calculator" tools online compute one trade at a time: enter a strike and contract count, get a dollar figure. That's fine for deciding whether to place one trade. It doesn't answer the question that actually matters once you're running the strategy for real: if every short put across every account were assigned on the same day, do you have enough cash in total? A $5,000 put in a Fidelity IRA and a $9,000 put in an IBKR margin account don't net against each other — each account needs its own cash, and your broker's own screen only ever shows you that one account. This tracker adds every open put's requirement together, tagged by account, and compares the total to the cash you've actually entered for each one.
Say you're running puts in two accounts: a $45 put (2 contracts) in Account A, and a $60 put (1 contract) plus a $30 put (3 contracts) in Account B.
Enter each position with its account tag and this is computed automatically, per account and as a portfolio total, with a red/green flag the moment any account is short.
The premium you collect divided by the cash required is your return on that trade — sell a $45 put for $120 in premium and your static return is 120 / 4,500 = 2.67% for the life of that one put. That figure alone doesn't account for how long you held the position, which is why an annualized version matters more for comparing trades of different lengths; add an entry date and the tracker computes it using your actual holding period rather than assuming a fixed window. See the full breakdown on annualized yield.
This calculator assumes literal cash-secured mechanics — the full strike × 100 × contracts sitting available, not a margin-reduced buying-power requirement. If your broker lets you sell puts against margin with a smaller reserved amount, your actual buying-power usage will be lower than the number shown here; this tool deliberately shows the full cash-secured figure so you always know your worst-case obligation, not a margin-dependent one that can shift with broker policy.
Beyond a single calculation, the dashboard lets you set a warning threshold — for example, get flagged once your open puts are using 80% of your available cash across all accounts, rather than finding out you're maxed out only after you try to place the next trade.
Rearrange the formula: cash available ÷ (strike × 100) gives the maximum contracts you can sell fully cash-secured at that strike. Selling more than that means you're no longer cash-secured in the literal sense, even if your broker's margin rules technically allow the order to go through.
Does this include the premium I collected? No — cash required is the strike-based obligation only. Premium collected is tracked separately and factors into your return and P/L, not into how much cash you need to reserve.
What if I'm assigned on some puts but not others? Move the assigned position to your covered-call side once you own the shares, and adjust that account's cash and share balances — the tracker doesn't auto-detect assignment, since that information only exists at your broker.
Does it work across different brokers? Yes — an account "tag" is any broker × account combination (Fidelity-Roth, IBKR-Margin, anywhere); positions and cash are entered manually per tag, so it's broker-agnostic by design.