Calculator
Iron Condor Profit Calculator
Iron Condor Profit Calculator
An iron condor sells an out-of-the-money put spread and call spread for credit, capping both sides with long options. Profit is capped at the credit; loss is capped at the wider wing minus the credit. Strikes must be ordered: long put < short put < short call < long call.
Maximum Profit (Credit)
$185.00
Condor Analysis
The condor collects $185.00 of credit if the underlying holds between 408.15 and 451.85 at expiry — a 43.70-point profit zone around your 430 entry. Below the lower break-even, losses grow point for point down to -$815.00 at the long put strike; above the upper break-even, the same happens up to the long call. Wing widths: put side 10.0 pts, call side 10.0 pts; reward-to-risk is 1:4.4. Right now the nearest break-even sits 5.1% away from the underlying.
*Excludes commissions, exercise risk, and early-assignment risk on American-style options. Short options carry margin requirements. Educational only, not investment advice.
Selling the Range, Capping the Damage
An iron condor is the options expression of a simple market opinion: this underlying is going to stay put. Structurally it sells an out-of-the-money put spread and an out-of-the-money call spread simultaneously, collecting a credit for the privilege, then buys further-out options to cap the loss on both sides. The result is a trade with three known numbers before entry — the maximum profit is the credit collected, the maximum loss is the wider wing minus the credit, and the profit exists only in the price range between the two break-even points. No surprises at expiry; the entire payoff is drawn in advance. For US retail options traders the condor is the workhorse of neutral strategies, because it defines risk in both directions while capturing the premium decay that time hands to sellers. The discipline it rewards is precise: wider wings and cheaper premiums lower the credit but expand the profit zone; tighter wings and better premiums raise the credit but shrink the zone and push the break-evens closer. Every one of those trade-offs is arithmetic, and pricing them before entry is exactly what separates a condor chosen for structure from one chosen for the size of the credit alone. This calculator maps all of it: break-evens, profit-zone width in points, both wing widths, the reward-to-risk fraction, the buffer from the underlying to the nearest break-even, and the P&L at any expiry price you want to test — the full payoff diagram in a table.
Four Strikes, Four Formulas
The condor's max profit is the net credit times one hundred times the contract count — if the underlying finishes between the short strikes, every option expires worthless and the seller keeps it all. The max loss works the other way: the wider of the two wings (short strike minus long strike on either side) minus the credit, times one hundred times contracts. Below the lower break-even the put spread goes fully against the seller while the call spread expires worthless, producing a linear loss capped at the long put strike; above the upper break-even the same happens mirrored on the call side. The break-evens anchor the trade: the lower one is the short put strike minus the credit, the upper one the short call strike plus the credit, and the profit zone is simply the distance between them. The geometry carries the trade's character: a symmetric condor with equal wings has a single max-loss figure; an asymmetric one — a deliberately wider call wing against a put-heavy risk view — shifts the risk profile to the side the trader is willing to carry. The reward-to-risk readout expresses the credit against the max loss as a fraction, and the buffer percentage measures how far the underlying sits from its nearest break-even — the margin of safety the structure bought at entry. One honest caveat the math cannot remove: American-style options can be assigned early if a short leg moves deeply in-the-money, and the loss cap assumes the position is held to expiry or closed before assignment; the formulas describe the intended payoff, and position management keeps reality inside it.
Expert Insights
The Credit Is the Bait; the Zone Is the Trade
Every condor screen tempts with the headline credit, but the number that decides outcomes is the profit-zone width — the distance between break-evens the underlying must stay inside. A fat credit with break-evens one percent from the current price is a bet the market will barely move, and markets move. A modest credit with twelve-point buffers on each side is a bet on ordinary behavior, which is the bet the statistics actually support. Read the credit, then read the zone; when the two conflict, the zone is telling the truth about what the credit is being paid to risk. The best condors are the ones whose zone matches the trader's honest forecast, not the ones whose credit matches their hopes.
Reward-to-Risk on Condors Is Deliberately Lopsided
A 1:4 or 1:5 reward-to-risk on every trade sounds like a losing recipe — until you account for the probability structure: the condor wins whenever the underlying stays inside a wide, deliberately chosen range, and that happens most of the time. The strategy's edge comes from selling tail risk that is overpriced by the market, not from favorable payoff fractions. The implication for judgment: evaluate a condor by the probability its zone survives, not by the reward-to-risk ratio the calculator prints, and size it so that the maximum loss — the one-in-ten or one-in-twenty outcome — is a survivable, boring write-off rather than a quarter of the account. The math is honest about this: condors make money by losing small and often, and the discipline is accepting that profile before the first one does its job.
Expiry Week Is Where Condors Move
The trade earns decay quietly for most of its life and then, inside the final week, the short legs accelerate toward the money with every day's move. Two failure modes dominate: holding a condor through a late run that crosses a short strike, and panic-closing one that was never actually in danger. The operational answer is a written threshold — 'close if the underlying reaches the short strike' or 'close at fifty percent of max profit' — decided before entry and executed without improvisation. The expiry-price scenario field exists for exactly this rehearsal: price the position at the outcomes you are actually worried about while there is still time to act on them, and let the rehearsed answer govern the live one.
Actionable Tips
- 1
Choose the Zone, Then Shop the Credit
Decide the range the underlying should stay inside based on your honest forecast — typically a width of 1.5–2 times the expected move to expiry — pick the short strikes around that zone, and only then evaluate the credit the market pays for it. If the credit is thin at your chosen range, the market is paying little for the bet; widen the wings or skip the trade, but do not narrow the zone to fatten the credit. Reversing that order — credit first, zone after — is how condors become gambles that the market barely moves, and those bets lose more often than they look likely to.
- 2
Size by Max Loss, Not by Credit
The temptation on condors is to size by the credit collected — ten contracts for $1,850 feels like income. The risk is the max loss: ten contracts at $815 max loss is an $8,150 exposure, and one bad outcome erases four months of collected credits. Size the position so the total max loss is a fixed, boring fraction of the options account — two to five percent is the working range — and let the credit be whatever that structure pays. A condor sized this way survives being wrong, which is the whole reason short-premium strategies exist: they are wrong often enough that survivability is the strategy.
- 3
Rehearse the Breach Before Entry
Before submitting, enter expiry prices just outside each break-even and inside each long strike, and read the P&L the calculator prints at each. The breach outcomes are exactly what the position does if the trade goes wrong, and seeing them while choosing the trade — when judgment is still unimpaired — is the only time the honest number is easy to accept. Write down the action each outcome triggers: hold, close one wing, or exit entirely. Condors that survive breaches with small losses almost always had the breach rehearsed; condors that turn into disasters almost always met it by surprise.
Real-World Examples
Dana Sized the Credit, Not the Loss — Once
Dana sold ten condors for $1,850 of credit, thrilled with the income figure, and did not compute the $8,150 max loss the structure carried. When the market ran through her short call in week two, she closed at a $5,900 loss — three months of condor income erased in one trade. From then on she sized every condor by max loss at four percent of her options account: fewer contracts, thinner collected credits, and a breach that costs a known, survivable number instead of a quarter of the book. The trade's edge never changed; the sizing discipline is what kept the edge from eating itself.
Victor Chose the Zone From the Earnings Calendar
Victor's condor habit was to sell strikes one expected-move away from the underlying — until he noticed his losses clustered around event dates he had not checked. He began pulling the implied move from the options chain across the expiry window and setting his short strikes just outside it: on a stock pricing a 5% move, his break-evens sat at 7%. The win rate on his trades rose from mid-fifties to low-seventies without changing the credit he collected by much. The zone had been the variable all along; the calendar just told him how to set it honestly.
Mei Rehearsed the Put Breach and Survived It
Mei's pre-entry drill was to enter her breach prices into the calculator and write the response next to each: 'if underlying hits 408, close the put wing.' Three months in, the underlying ran down to exactly 408, and the written answer executed in minutes — closing the put wing for a controlled loss while the untouched call wing expired worthless, netting a small credit overall. The breach had been a disaster scenario in her head and a line in her notes; executing the note instead of the fear is what kept a wrong trade from becoming a large loss.
Glossary of Terms
- Iron Condor
- A four-option strategy selling an out-of-the-money put spread and call spread against further-out bought options, defined-risk in both directions, profiting if price stays in range.
- Net Credit
- The premium collected minus the premium paid for the protective wings — the maximum profit of the trade, kept if the underlying finishes between the short strikes.
- Break-Even Price
- The underlying price at expiry where the trade's P&L is zero — short strike minus credit on the put side, short strike plus credit on the call side.
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Ivy Sinclair-Wren
Financial Chaos Analyst
Ivy Sinclair-Wren is a Financial Chaos Analyst covering investing, AI, wealth psychology, and the emotional consequences of opening finance apps during market crashes. Based in Melbourne, she specializes in demystifying the US tax code and helping users navigate the intersection of spreadsheet logic and human irrationality.