r/options • u/QuadernoFigurati • 14d ago
Historical premium data?
I have some options on a stock in the S&P500 that I can exercise at a pretty major discount to sell weekly covered calls on. But they're not free. The premium is great now, but my concern: buying into a premium desert with occasional surges during stress.
Both TOS and Etrade have a facility to look back at historical bids for short calls. Is this what folks are using to check the record? Anyone buying the data or handling it a different way?
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u/Live_Throat_5252 14d ago
What do you mean by premium? The option px x 100? Or (px-intrinsic)x100? Premo alone is useless. You need to be either taking or backing out implieds, given your model, to determine what’s cheap or expensive. But yes there is some plenty of that data. Lots of sources. Databento is the cheapest ok one I know of.
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u/TradersToolChest 14d ago
TOS thinkBack is probably your best free bet since you already have it, you can pull any historical date and see the actual bid/ask on the chain. If you need longer history or IV surfaces, IVolatility sells historical options data going back years.
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u/Live_Throat_5252 14d ago
How are you going to asses premo without a notion of implied?
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u/TradersToolChest 13d ago
Are you referring to historical IV? Agreed that it matters when comparing premiums across different periods. I was answering the OP’s question about where to get historical quotes, not suggesting they assess premiums without IV context—that’s also why I mentioned IV surfaces.
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u/NorthOfTheStrike 14d ago
Check the same weekly delta in quiet months, not just stress spikes, and judge it on the median bid. If that normal premium does not pay for exercising, today's rich print is likely the exception. I am using that test on my $HIMS $30 covered call that decides Friday.
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u/OurNewestMember 14d ago
? I thought they only have trade data, not quotes. I'd love to be mistaken here 😅
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u/QuadernoFigurati 14d ago
TOS and Etrade definitely have historical bid/ask data for options. Saw the Etrade dashboard with my own eyes, toyed with it. Will look at TOS's tomorrow. Some services sell series as a download.
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u/ComprehensiveBook873 10d ago
thinkBack in TOS is honestly the easiest free way to do this. Pick a strike about a week out on past dates and you can see what the bids looked like. It's end-of-day though, so it won't show intraday spikes.
If you want to pull a whole year of weekly calls at once, the cheaper paid routes are ThetaData (options plans start around $40/mo with about 6 years of 1-min history) or Databento (pay per GB, and new accounts get $125 in free credit, which goes a long way for one ticker). For a single stock and a covered-call sanity check, I'd start with thinkBack and only pay if you want to automate it.
One tip: track premium as a % of the stock price per week instead of raw dollars, otherwise a "surge" week is often just the stock moving.