Long Put 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.

Not directly — this page prices a single bought put. A bear put spread also sells a lower-strike put, which caps the profit and cuts the cost. The engine behind this page already handles multi-leg positions, so spreads are a planned addition rather than a rebuild; in the meantime you can price each leg here and add them.

The strike minus the premium. The put has to be worth more than you paid before you profit, so a $95 put bought for $2.50 breaks even at $92.50. The calculator also shows that as a percentage fall from today's price, which is usually the more useful way to judge it.

The strike less the premium, times 100, times the contracts — reached only if the stock goes to zero. A $95 put bought at $2.50 tops out at $9,250 per contract. This is the structural difference from a call, whose upside genuinely has no ceiling, and it is a common error to report a put as unlimited too.

Not on a bought put. The premium is the entire risk. That is the main reason people buy puts for protection rather than shorting: a short position's loss is open-ended, a put's is fixed and known before you enter.

Different trades. The short makes money on any fall and loses without limit on a rise; the put costs a premium, needs a bigger move to pay, and cannot lose more than what you paid. The comparison panel on this page shows both at the same finishing price so you can see the trade-off directly, though it does not include the borrow cost a short would pay.

The put's own numbers are the same, but your overall position is not — the loss on the put is offset by the shares it protects, so what looks like a wasted premium here is the cost of an insurance policy that did not need to pay out. This page prices the put alone.

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.

Worthless, and you lose the premium. The right to sell at $95 when the stock is $95 is worth nothing. Prices of $95.01, $95.00 and $94.99 are all effectively a total loss on the option.

It fell below the strike but not below the breakeven. A $95 put costing $2.50 is worth $1 at $94 — some money back, less than you paid. Everything between the breakeven and the strike is a reduced loss rather than a gain.

To exercise it, yes — exercising sells 100 shares per contract at the strike, and if you do not own them you end up short. In practice most people sell the put rather than exercise, which realises the same value without creating a stock position.

A put that finishes in the money by a cent or more is generally auto-exercised, which sells 100 shares per contract at the strike — leaving you short the stock if you did not own it. If that is not what you want, close the position before the close on expiration day.

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.