Theta Desk: The Options Trading Rulebook That Won't Let You Improvise

Every options seller has rules. Delta between 0.20 and 0.30. Close at 50% of credit. Never more than 15% of the account in one name.

The problem is where those rules live: in your head, in a note-taking app you stopped opening in March, or in a spreadsheet with numbers you calculated when your account was a different size.

Rules that live in your head don't survive contact with an open browser and a juicy premium. That's why we built Theta Desk — a trading rulebook engine where every standard operating procedure is written down, organized by sleeve, and pegged to your live account value.

What Theta Desk Actually Is

Theta Desk is the rulebook module in ThetaHarvester. It's not a screener and it's not a tracker — it's the answer to one question, asked before every trade: what are my rules for this exact kind of position, in dollars, today?

The desk is organized into nine sleeves, each with its own tab:

1. Global Rules — the constitution. Rules that sit above every sleeve; when a sleeve rule and a global rule disagree, the global rule wins.
2. Wheel / CSP — undefined-risk premium selling that wants assignment.
3. Covered Calls — renting out shares the wheel put in your account.
4. Credit Spreads — defined-risk premium with strict credit-to-width floors.
5. Convexity — long calls and LEAPs: the positive-skew sleeve.
6. Shares · Long — the equity book with hard stop rules.
7. Shares · Short — the rules for being short stock, if you ever are.
8. Tail Hedge — the decay budget that pays for crash insurance.
9. Cash / Bills — the T-bill floor and cash sweep discipline.

Each sleeve page has the same anatomy: a purpose statement (what this sleeve is for and what it is emphatically not for), entry gates, sizing rules in live dollars, exit rules, and a short list of don'ts — the mistakes this sleeve exists to prevent.

Everything Is Pegged to NAV

Here's the design decision that makes Theta Desk different from a document: percentages are the source of truth, and your NAV re-pegs everything.

At the top of the desk sits one input: your account's net asset value. Below it, the R-strip — a row of live dollar figures derived from it:

• R per trade — 0.65% of NAV. The maximum you're allowed to lose on any single idea.
• Theme cap — 40% of NAV across every sleeve. Long calls plus bull puts plus shares in the same theme all count together.
• CSP single-name cap — 15% of NAV of full-assignment exposure in one ticker.
• Defined risk budget — 5% of NAV of total open spread risk.
• Convexity premium — 15% of NAV deployed in long options, maximum.
• Hedge budget — 3% of NAV per year of acceptable decay spend.
• Bill floor — 40% of NAV that stays in T-bills, full stop.

Change the NAV and every card, every sizer, and every gate recalculates. Your rules stop being "about $250 of risk per trade, I think" and become an exact number that updates when your account does.

The Pre-Trade Gates

Each trading sleeve carries a gate view: a checklist you clear before the order goes in. For the Wheel/CSP sleeve, that means confirming things like:

• Delta between 0.20 and 0.30
• DTE between 14 and 45
• Full assignment ≤ 15% of NAV in the name (starter positions ≤ 7.5%)
• Expiry doesn't span earnings — or if it does, it's starter size and explicitly tagged
• Liquid underlying with penny-ish spreads
• You'd genuinely own the stock at the strike — assignment is the plan, not the accident

The gate isn't decoration. The first global rule of the desk is blunt: no trade without a written stop and a defined R. If R can't be defined, the trade does not exist. Clearing the gate logs the trade's sleeve, stop level, and dollar risk — an audit trail of every decision you made at entry, when you were still objective.

Sizers That Do the Arithmetic

Under the sizing rules, several sleeves carry a live position sizer. The CSP sizer takes a strike and tells you how many contracts fit under the single-name assignment cap. The spread sizer takes width and credit and sizes against your per-trade R. The convexity sizer checks a long call's premium against the 2–3.5% of NAV band that keeps the lottery-ticket sleeve honest.

This kills the most common sizing failure: doing the math after falling in love with the trade.

Exits Are Written at Entry

Every sleeve's exit rules follow the same philosophy as the grading system in our covered call calculator: decisions get made before the position exists.

For the wheel sleeve, that looks like:

• GTC buy-to-close at 50% of credit — placed at entry, not later
• 21-DTE time check: not near target → close or roll
• Assigned → the Shares SOP takes over immediately, with its −15% / −25% stop ladder

The weekly housekeeping rules live in the Global sleeve: cancel orphan orders, verify every live short-premium position has its profit-target close attached, sweep excess cash to bills.

Why a Rulebook Engine Beats a Document

A rules document is static. It rots. Theta Desk stays live in three ways:

The dollars are always current. A monthly re-peg rule recalculates every card from live NAV on the first trading day of each month — and editing NAV on Theta Desk re-pegs the Portfolio Allocator too, because both engines share one NAV.

The rules are versioned. Each sleeve carries its revision date. When you change a rule, you know when and can compare campaign results across revisions.

The friction is at the right moment. The gate puts your rules between you and the submit button — exactly where gut feeling does its damage.

"The best options sellers aren't the ones with the best feel for the market. They're the ones with rules they follow consistently."

We wrote that in our first post about ThetaHarvester, and Theta Desk is that idea taken to its logical end: the rules aren't advice anymore. They're infrastructure.

Try It Free

Open Theta Desk at tharvester.com, set your NAV, and read your own book. Every sleeve, gate, sizer, and exit rule is free to use — sign in with a magic link if you want your NAV and gate log to persist across sessions.

Pair it with the Wheel Tracker for cost-basis tracking and the Portfolio Allocator for book-level budgets, and the whole desk runs on one set of numbers.