How Archer selects strikes — and why we don't ask you to think about delta

The problem with how most people teach this

Most options education starts with delta. You'll hear things like "sell the 0.30 delta put" or "stay below 0.20 delta for safety." The intention is good — delta is a useful concept. But as an entry point for deciding which strike to sell, it asks you to understand a Greek before you've understood the trade.

The intuitive alternative is to think in premium dollars. Pick a target — say, $0.50 per contract — and find the strike that pays you that. Simple, tangible, no Greeks required. This is how a lot of experienced traders actually think, and it works reasonably well for most stocks in a normal price range.

The problem shows up at the edges. And the edges are where real money gets misallocated.

When dollar-based targets break down

Consider two hypothetical trades, both targeting a "conservative" $0.25 premium:

Same premium target. Wildly different trades. The dollar premium was doing two jobs at once — expressing risk posture and ensuring minimum economic viability — and it was doing neither of them correctly across the full range of stock prices.

A similar problem appears on the other end. A high-volatility stock like RKLB might pay $0.25 on a strike that's only 8% below current price — a much more aggressive position than a $0.25 premium on a calm, large-cap stock would suggest.

The fix: separate the two jobs

Archer's approach separates what premium-first conflates:

• Risk posture → expressed through delta. Delta is the market's probability estimate of a put expiring in-the-money. A 0.10 delta means roughly 10% assignment probability — and it means that consistently, across every stock in your universe, regardless of price or volatility.
• Minimum viability → enforced by a $0.25 premium floor. Once the right strike is identified, Archer checks whether it generates at least $0.25 per contract. If not, the position is rejected — not worth the margin, commission friction, and assignment risk for that return.

Delta is now the selector. The premium floor is the gate. They do different jobs and they do them independently.

Risk posture: set once, used always

The question "how much risk do I want to take on this stock?" is one you shouldn't have to answer every single time you open a position. If you've traded AMZN twelve times and you're consistently comfortable with a moderate risk posture, Archer shouldn't make you re-express that each time.

Risk posture is a persistent per-ticker setting. You configure it once in your Archer universe — Conservative, Balanced, or Aggressive — and the recommendation engine reads it on every cycle. You can override it for a specific trade, but the default is stable and consistent.

The mapping isn't arbitrary. Conservative posture targets a delta range where assignment probability is genuinely low — you're selling premium with the expectation that you won't be assigned. Aggressive posture targets a range where assignment is a real possibility, and that's intentional: these are stocks you have strong conviction in and would be genuinely comfortable owning at the strike price.

What this looks like on the same stock at different postures

Here's how the same stock produces very different trades depending on your configured posture:

Notice that all three pass the $0.25 premium floor comfortably — AMZN has enough volatility to generate meaningful premiums across the posture range. The floor matters more for lower-volatility or very high-priced stocks where conservative strikes might generate near-zero premiums.

What Archer does — and doesn't — decide for you

Archer's recommendation engine uses your configured posture to find the optimal strike on the current options chain. It runs several checks before surfacing a recommendation: whether there's a valid expiration in the target DTE window, whether the chain has adequate liquidity at that strike, whether earnings fall within the expiration period, and whether the position clears the $0.25 floor.

What Archer doesn't decide is which stocks belong in your universe, or what your risk posture should be on each one. Those are your calls — and they should be. The underlying is the most important decision in the wheel strategy, and it requires judgment about businesses, conviction, and how you'd feel holding 100 shares if the stock dropped 20%. No algorithm is well-positioned to make that call for you.

The short version

Dollar premium is an output, not an input. It tells you what a strike is worth after the market has priced in volatility, time, and probability. Using it as the primary selector produces inconsistent results across different stocks and price levels.

Delta expresses the one thing that actually matters when selecting a strike: how likely is it that this trade goes against you? The same delta on every stock you trade means the same risk posture, regardless of whether that stock trades at $30 or $300.

Archer configures your risk posture once per ticker, maps it to the right delta range, finds the strike on the chain that fits, verifies the premium clears the minimum bar, and surfaces the recommendation. You review it, approve it, and execute it in your brokerage account. The framework handles the consistency. The judgment stays with you.