About
A research problem became a product.
How a missing step in our options research workflow became a tool for comparing structures by ticker and expiration.
In July 2025, we began publishing options research and documenting real trading decisions on 10delta.io. The work started with charts and trades, but it kept returning to a harder question: after finding an interesting underlying, which options structure deserves attention first?
The origin
The missing step kept showing up
Our research process already had strong tools for each visible part of a trade. A charting platform helped us find and study the underlying. An option chain showed prices, strikes, liquidity, and implied volatility. A payoff builder made it possible to model exact legs once a structure had been chosen.
What remained manual was the decision between those stages. Should this setup be expressed with a vertical spread, a butterfly, a condor, a ratio structure, a volatility trade, or something stock-linked? The chart did not answer that question. The chain did not answer it either. A payoff calculator arrived after the choice had already been made.
That gap matters because two traders can share the same directional opinion while trading very different assumptions. One structure may need a fast move. Another may benefit from time decay. Another may target a narrow price zone, a volatility expansion, or protection against a tail event. “Bullish” or “bearish” is only the beginning of the decision.
Publish the work
We began sharing options research, real decisions, wins, drawdowns, and process improvements through the 10 Delta publication.
Choose the structure
Every serious review required the same manual synthesis of price, time, volatility, events, liquidity, and payoff shape.
Make the comparison explicit
We turned that synthesis into a product that compares structures for one underlying and one exact expiration.
The product
Built from the research workflow
Options Playbook starts where our own analysis starts: with the underlying. The user reads the current setup, selects the expiration that matches the trade horizon, and then receives five structures that fit that specific combination of market context and time.
The comparison is based on prepared facts rather than an open-ended conversation. Daily and weekly price structure, extension, expected move, volatility pricing, skew, event timing, quote quality, volume, and open interest are assembled before the AI evaluates the available structures. The result is checked against the product catalog before anything reaches the screen.
The purpose is not to remove judgment. It is to make the first strategy decision more structured, faster to inspect, and easier to challenge. A trader can still reject the comparison, change the expiration, or model different strikes. The product simply makes clear which structures are worth examining first and what each one is trying to trade.
Read
The publication
10 Delta Playbook remains the place for research notes, trade reviews, and the thinking that shaped the workflow.
Read 10delta.ioUse
The decision tool
The product applies that workflow to a ticker and expiration selected by the user. It does not place trades, choose position size, or promise an outcome.
Open the app