Collin Miciunas

Why this exists

I've been investing since high school, more than twenty years now. Options came later: I got hooked in 2015 after finding tastytrade, and spent a long time learning them before any of it was worth doing with real size.

What I wanted was something on top of index investing that didn't mean keeping up with thousands of individual stocks. Stock picking is a second job, and I already have one. And as I've gotten older there's less time, so the honest test for an approach is whether you can still do it when the month gets busy.

Selling a monthly at-the-money put against an index fund I already owned passed that test: one decision a month, one instrument, a rule for when to close it.

So I built a tool for it. Then I started running other strategies beside it, and the tool grew into what Restrike is now: every strategy tracked and scored on its own.

Main Street Wolf

If you found this from a video, it's the same person. I publish investing and options education as Main Street Wolf on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X and Threads, to more than 285,000 followers across them.

The videos and this site do the same job: explain how these instruments actually work, including the parts that lose money. Neither tells anyone what to buy. Restrike is my own product, not something I was paid to mention.

The written version of what the videos cover is Learn: a course in three levels, a page for each common strategy, and two tools for finding the strategies that fit a view.

What the research actually found

I didn't set out to build a case for selling puts every month. I started with SPY and VIX data and a narrower question: when is the best time to sell puts on an index ETF? The intuition most people share is to wait for a volatility spike and sell into fear.

VIX spikes don't come often enough to build a strategy on. Waiting for them meant sitting out most of the sample. And selling every month still produced returns, even with VIX near the low end of its range. The edge wasn't in picking the moment; it was in being there every month, sized so the bad months didn't end it.

That's why the tool has no timing feature. The research found the same thing from the other side: the rules it tested for timing a covered call couldn't be told apart from luck. It would be easy to sell a signal. The data didn't support one.

How I work on it

I keep running new tests and re-checking what I've already published, and I'd rather change an answer than defend an old one. Figures on this site are generated from the backtest wherever they can be, and an automatic check fails if a number typed into a sentence disagrees with the data behind it.

None of it is arranged to make the strategy look good. The drawdown sits beside every return, the costs are stated as zero because that's what the run assumed, and the covered call study found they lose to simply holding the index.

If you find something here that doesn't add up, tell me. That's worth more to me than a compliment.