Option Samurai

What it is

Option Samurai is an options strategy scanner in the browser. You pick a strategy — covered call, cash-secured put, verticals, iron condor, calendars, butterflies, ratio spreads — add filters, and it runs the combination across roughly 1.3 million listed US options, returning a sortable table of concrete trades with return on risk, probability of profit, break-even and expected value.

The filters are the product: option statistics, implied volatility rank, IV against realised volatility, skew, liquidity, earnings and ex-dividend dates, fundamentals, analyst targets and technical indicators. A custom-strategy screener lets you define the legs yourself. Around the scanner sit a single-ticker analyzer that compares strategies for a target price and date you enter, a P&L chart per trade, and a trade log for real or hypothetical positions.

It sits beside Market Chameleon and OptionStrat for the same reason they do: it is bought for options work and hands over no raw feed.

Pricing

Beginner is $49 a month and Advanced $75 on monthly billing, or $39 and $59 a month billed annually. The page opens on the annual figure; the monthly one is behind the toggle, and seasonal promotions replace both while they run.

Advanced adds what automates the scanner: alerts on saved scans, the spreadsheet add-in, custom strategies of four option legs plus stock instead of two legs in total, and unlimited trade-log accounts instead of two. The emailed premium reports come with annual billing only — end-of-day on Beginner, intraday on Advanced.

The 14-day trial needs no card and opens everything; there is no free tier after it. Initial and monthly payments are non-refundable; an annual renewal can be refunded within seven days.

Data & coverage

US listed options on over 4,000 optionable stocks, ETFs and indexes. The help centre says there is no data for non-US markets and none for futures.

Latency is where the marketing and the product diverge. The site says "live" and "intraday", and alerts re-check scans during market hours, but the app's option chain carries a notice that quotes are delayed, and the stock chart on the details page is labelled 20 minutes delayed. The delay on option quotes is not published.

Open interest, the Samurai Stock Score, analyst recommendations and earnings fields refresh overnight. Spread statistics use the mid by default; a bid-ask setting moves them to conservative (sell at bid, buy at ask) or towards a theoretical best case.

Integrations

The Excel and Google Sheets add-in is a real add-in, not an export. It adds STOCK, OPTION and HEADER functions that pull scanner data points into cells, and an option can be addressed by rule — nearest 30 days out, three strikes out of the money, closest to a 25 delta — so a sheet keeps working after its contracts expire. Sheets installs from the Workspace Marketplace. Excel is sideloaded from a manifest file, or on Windows from a mapped network share; it is not in Microsoft's add-in store.

Scan results export to CSV, and all matching options up to 1,000 rows. Alerts are email only: new-ticker notices or scheduled HTML or CSV reports. A trade can go to Tradier as a pre-filled order link or to thinkorswim through the clipboard, confirmed in the broker either way. No API, no webhooks, no broker import, and no native app — on a phone it is the website saved to the home screen.

Limitations

• Quote delay unstated, so a spread ranked by cents of credit may already be gone.
• Mid-price by default. Four-leg results at the mid are the hardest to fill; the conservative setting fixes that and returns fewer rows.
• Some outputs pick tickers for you. Each premium report lists three bullish and three bearish tickers from an open-interest or option-volume "centre". The Samurai Stock Score grades stocks 1 to 10 in three categories, and the help centre labels 7 and above bullish. Predefined scans carry names such as "Safe covered calls". All are rule-based and described in the help centre, with no analyst behind them, but the selection is the vendor's, not yours.
• Personal, non-commercial use only, under fair-use quotas on scans, monitors and trade-log entries that the vendor may enforce with a ban. The alert quota per plan is not published.
• No futures, no non-US listings, no backtest of a scan's past results.

Alternatives

Market Chameleon is the delayed-only screener built around earnings-move history. OptionStrat is stronger on building and charting one trade than on scanning the market. ORATS sells the volatility data itself for your own code. The rest are in market data APIs.