Long Call Calculator

Per share — the number your broker quotes. A premium shown as 3.20 means $3.20 a share, which is $320 for one contract. Entering 320 here would overstate the trade a hundredfold, so the field is labelled per share and the results panel always shows the total separately.

On your broker's option chain for the ticker and expiry you are looking at. The strike is the row; the premium is the bid, the ask, or the mid depending on which side of the trade you expect to get filled. Buyers are usually closer to the ask, sellers closer to the bid.

Use the price you realistically expect to trade at. The mid is a fair planning assumption on a liquid contract with a tight spread. On a wide spread the mid can be optimistic by more than the edge you are hoping for, so run the calculation twice — once at the mid, once at the worse side — and see whether the trade still makes sense.

It does not change the payoff at expiration — that depends only on where the stock finishes. It is used for the percentage move required to reach breakeven, and for the leverage comparison. Both are context for deciding whether the trade is plausible, not part of the P/L arithmetic.

Enter the total contracts and the weighted average premium you actually paid or received. If the fills were far apart, running each block separately and adding the results is more honest, because a single average hides how different the two breakevens are.

Yes. Copy link puts every input into the URL, so the link you paste opens with the answer already on screen — useful for a second opinion or for your own notes. Download CSV gives you the summary plus the whole payoff curve, which opens straight into a spreadsheet.

The payoff at expiration is identical however far away the expiry is — same formula, same breakeven. What a long-dated call does differently is spend most of its life as time value, so its price before expiry moves quite unlike this chart. Fine for the expiry question, not for the interim one.

The strike plus the premium you paid. You need the stock above that at expiration to make anything, because the option first has to be worth what it cost you. On a $105 call bought at $3.20 the breakeven is $108.20 — and the calculator also shows it as a percentage move from today's price, which is the number that tells you whether it is realistic.

Because there is no upper limit on a share price, so there is no upper limit on what the call can be worth. The page prints "Unlimited" rather than a large number, because inventing a ceiling would be a forecast dressed up as arithmetic.

Not on a bought call. The premium is the whole risk, and the payoff line goes flat below the strike for exactly that reason. Losing 100% of it is common, though — that is what happens any time the stock fails to clear the strike.

How much stock your premium controls. Spending $320 on a call over 100 shares of a $100 stock controls $10,000 of stock, which is about 31×. It cuts both ways: the same multiple that turns a 20% share move into a 369% gain turns a flat share price into a total loss.

Because they would have. Shares make money on any rise; a call has to clear the strike and then earn back the premium before it makes anything at all. Below the breakeven the stock position wins, and above it the call usually wins by a lot. Seeing both is the point of the comparison.

Not here, and deliberately so. P/L before expiry depends on implied volatility, interest rates and the time remaining, and any tool that shows it is running a model whose inputs you would have to supply and trust. This page answers the narrower question exactly rather than the broader one approximately.

The call expires worthless and you lose the premium. There is no intrinsic value at the strike — the right to buy at $105 when the stock is $105 is worth nothing — so $104.99, $105.00 and $105.01 are all essentially a full loss.

Because it finished above the strike but below the breakeven. A $105 call costing $3.20 is worth $1 if the stock lands at $106 — real money back, but less than the $3.20 you paid. Anything between the strike and the breakeven is a smaller loss, not a profit.

Almost never. Selling the option before expiry realises the same value without needing the cash to buy 100 shares, and it captures any time value still left. Exercising makes sense mainly when you actually want to own the stock.

US brokers generally auto-exercise a call that finishes in the money by a cent or more, which means buying 100 shares per contract and needing the cash or margin to settle. If you do not want that, close the position before the close on expiration day — or tell your broker not to exercise.

Because at expiration there is no time value left — an option is worth exactly its intrinsic value, and intrinsic value needs only the strike and the finishing stock price. Volatility matters for what an option is worth before expiry, which is a pricing question rather than a profit question.

Only if you enter them. Put the total for the round trip in the commissions field and they come off the profit and move the breakeven — a $13 commission on one contract shifts the breakeven by 13 cents, which is small but not nothing on a tight trade.

No. Options tax treatment depends on your country, your holding period, whether the position was assigned or closed, and in some cases whether it was part of a straddle. Treat every figure here as pre-tax and check your own situation.

Ignored. A dividend reduces the stock price on the ex-date, which affects where the stock finishes, and for anyone short a call it raises the chance of early assignment the day before the ex-date. Neither effect is modelled.

The calculator assumes the standard US equity multiplier of 100 shares per contract. After a split, a spin-off or a merger a contract can be adjusted to a non-standard deliverable, and index options use other multipliers. In those cases the per-contract figures here will be wrong.

No. The whole calculation runs in your browser; nothing is sent to a server, there is no account, and the page works the same with the network switched off after it loads.