The wheel is a well-known retail options routine with two phases. First you sell cash-secured puts on a stock you'd be happy to own: you collect a premium, and if the price falls to your strike you get assigned — you buy the shares. Then you flip to phase two and sell covered calls against those shares: more premium, until the stock rises to your call strike and gets called away. Then you start the wheel again.
It's one bet, not two
Both phases do the same thing: sell volatility for premium. By put-call parity a cash-secured put and a covered call have nearly identical payoffs, so the wheel isn't two independent edges stacked — it's a single short-volatility position you hold continuously. The premium is real, but it's pay for bearing crash risk: in a sharp sell-off your puts get assigned near the top and you ride the fall down (softened by the premium you banked), and in a strong rally your calls cap the upside.
Why we don't fake a wheel backtest
A real wheel is path-dependent — what you're holding depends on whether you were assigned, which depends on the exact strikes and expiries you chose. An real backtest of that needs historical option chains and realistic (not mid-price) fills, or the numbers are fiction — which we won't publish (see the methodology). So the listed, always-on version of the wheel is simply to hold both premium-selling sleeves at once: the put-write funds and the covered-call funds, together, in real total-return ETFs. That's the Wheel Income strategy — a 50/50 blend of the PutWrite and Options Income baskets, with a track record that's those funds' actual audited backtest.
The catch
This is a smoother, lower-upside ride than a plain index — it lags badly in strong bull runs, and a fund's headline distribution yield is not its total return. No edge over simply holding the underlying is claimed; it's an income/low-drama sleeve, priced by its own backtest.
Educational material — not investment advice.