Options Backtesting Software: Best for Covered Call Sellers

If you sell covered calls and you want to know whether the program actually paid you, there are three realistic answers and they cost $0, $0 and $99 a month. tastytrade Lookback is free with a tastytrade account. thinkBack inside thinkorswim is free with a Schwab account, but it is a lookup rather than a test. ORATS Trading Tools at $99 a month is the deepest no-code options backtester an individual can buy, with chain history back to 2007. Option Alpha, which appears on most shortlists, cannot answer it at all: its backtester only tests 0DTE and next-day strategies, so a monthly covered call has no backtest there. Everything else on the usual shortlist either requires code, is not really an options backtester, or will not tell you what it costs.

That last group is bigger than you would expect, and it is where most of the wasted evaluation time goes. Below is what each platform will actually do with a call-writing rule, checked at each vendor's own pages on August 31, 2026, plus the one thing about historical options data that changes what your result means and that almost no comparison article mentions.

The platforms, side by side

Two entries on that list deserve more than a row, because in both cases the vendor's own page says something different from what the internet says it says.

The end-of-day option price is not the closing price

This is the finding that should change how you read any covered call backtest, and it is sitting in plain sight on two vendor pages.

ORATS describes its strike data as "gathered 14 minutes before the close to avoid wide spreads". Cboe, the exchange group itself, describes its Option EOD Summary product as a "daily market snapshot at 15:45 ET" alongside end-of-day figures. Two independent providers, one a reseller and one the exchange, converged on roughly 15:45 rather than 16:00 for the same reason: option markets widen into the bell, and a 4:00 pm quote is frequently a price nobody could have traded.

For a call seller this matters more than it does for a stock trader. Your entire result is the difference between the premium you collected and the upside you gave up, and both legs of that comparison are option prices. If your backtest assumes you sold at a closing quote that was thirty cents wide, it credited you premium that was not there. Fifteen minutes earlier, when the market is tighter, is a more honest fill assumption, and it is why the vendors chose it. The practical move is to ask what time your data was captured before you argue with the result. If the answer is "the close", ask a second question about how wide markets were handled.

What tastytrade actually publishes about Lookback

Lookback is the most recommended free options backtester, and the numbers attached to it in guides and forum posts do not agree with each other or with tastytrade. Third-party write-ups variously claim it covers 137 symbols and over 2,000 symbols, and that it holds 10, 12, 13 or 15 years of history. tastytrade's own tool page says only that it supports "popular symbols with 10+ years of data" and gives no symbol count at all. It confirms you can test "single options to multi-leg strategies" from either the long or short side, adjust contract quantity, strike delta and expiration, and exit at a set days-to-expiration or at a chosen profit or loss percentage, and it states plainly: "Test your trades by simulating with past data, for free."

None of the third-party numbers is necessarily wrong; several may have been true at different points, and coverage lists change. The point is narrower and more useful. If a specific underlying matters to your program, do not trust a review's symbol count. Open the tool and type the ticker. The one figure the vendor is willing to publish, "10+ years", is also the one that should worry you slightly, because ten years back from today starts in 2016 and contains no credit event at all. For a short-volatility strategy, the years you most need are the ones a ten-year window excludes.

Free, until you need depth

The free options are genuinely good and you should exhaust them first. Lookback will settle most questions about a delta and a roll schedule on a liquid underlying. thinkBack will settle a specific argument about a specific trade. Both cost nothing beyond an account you may already hold.

Where free runs out is depth and repetition. A covered call program is a sequence of many small decisions, and judging it means running the same rule across enough expirations that the sample means something, then varying one parameter and running it again. That is where a $99 platform earns its money, and it is also where people start pricing raw data instead. If you go that way, the arithmetic is worth doing first: we compared what every major vendor charges for historical option prices and option chain data, and the spread is much wider than the sticker prices suggest, from about $5 to about $40 per year of history included, with two vendors charging an identical $199 a month for four times the difference in depth.

Buying the data instead of a platform also means owning the plumbing. Chain files arrive as CSV over FTP or as paginated API responses, and getting a vendor feed and your own database talking to each other reliably is its own integration project before a single backtest runs. Budget for that, not just the subscription.

Questions people ask before choosing

What is the best free options backtesting software?

tastytrade Lookback, if you are willing to open a tastytrade account, because it tests real multi-leg structures against historical chains rather than replaying a chart. QuantConnect is more capable and also free, with options data on its free tier and unlimited backtests, but it requires Python or C#. thinkorswim's thinkBack is free with Schwab and is the right tool for checking one historical trade by hand. Anything advertising free deep option chain history without an account attached is usually scraped and incomplete.

Can you backtest covered calls without paying for options data?

For the question most call sellers are actually asking, yes. Whether writing calls against a position historically smoothed your returns, how much upside the cap cost, and whether the combination beat simply holding the shares can all be answered from the underlying's split and dividend adjusted price history with a stated premium assumption. You need chain-level data only when the answer turns on what a specific strike was quoted at on a specific date, for instance when you are comparing 30-delta against 20-delta precisely, or modeling early assignment around an ex-dividend date. Answer the cheap version first, because it usually settles the idea.

Does Interactive Brokers have an options backtester?

Not a no-code historical one. TWS is an execution and analytics platform with strong risk tooling, and there is no built-in facility to define a call-writing rule and run it across years of chain history. This trips people up because ORATS, which does have that facility, connects to Interactive Brokers along with TradeStation and Tradier to route orders, so the two get mentioned in the same sentence. Backtest in ORATS, execute through IBKR, is a real workflow. Backtest in IBKR is not.

How many years of options history do you need to test a covered call strategy?

Enough to include a genuine volatility shock, which in practice means reaching further back than 2016. Call writing looks its best in a steady grind higher and its worst in a fast crash followed by a sharp recovery, because the crash hands you the loss and the cap keeps you out of the rebound. A window that contains only the years since 2016 has one such episode, in 2020, and it recovered unusually fast. Twelve years reaches 2018 and 2020. Only datasets starting in 2007 or earlier reach 2008, which is the single most informative period for anything selling volatility.

Is ORATS worth $99 a month?

It depends on whether you are testing or trading. For $99 the Trading Tools subscription gives a no-code options backtester over history back to 2007, the ability to browse a very large library of existing backtests, 37 performance metrics with a monthly return table and a full trade log, an options and stock scanner, and order routing to three brokers. As of this check it also includes an intraday backtester for 0DTE strategies on 1-minute data back to October 2020 and a built-in AI agent. If you are running a real call-writing program across several positions, that is a reasonable price for the depth. If you want to answer one question about one ticker, it is far more tool than you need and a free option will do it.

Why do two platforms give different results for the same covered call rule?

Usually because of three things that have nothing to do with your strategy: what time of day the option prices were captured, whether the underlying series is raw or split and dividend adjusted, and what was assumed about fills and costs. The 15:45 versus 16:00 question above is the one specific to options. The adjustment question is the one that produces the largest gaps, and it is common enough that public forum threads exist where the same simple rule returns wildly different annual figures on two platforms without anyone resolving why. Before you conclude that a rule works, check that both tools agree on the data underneath it.

Start with the cheaper question

Most call-writing decisions do not need a chain-level platform at all. Before you subscribe to anything, run the structure against the underlying and see whether the trade-off is even interesting: you can do that on the covered call backtest bench, which takes the rule as a sentence such as "sell 30-delta covered calls on SPY, rolled monthly", shows you the restated rule card before it runs, tests it on 20+ years of split and dividend adjusted history with 0.1% charged per trade, and stamps an honest verdict including UNDERPERFORMED when holding the shares would have beaten you. Cash-secured puts and vertical spreads sit on options backtesting, and the full method, including what assignment does to the result, is on how to backtest a covered call strategy.

If that first pass says the idea is worth pursuing, then price the data. The vendor comparison for historical options data lays out every published tier by cost per year of history, and the sample-size question, how many expirations you need before a result means anything, is answered on how long you should backtest a trading strategy. Whether your existing broker already includes any of this is covered on does tastytrade have backtesting and does Interactive Brokers have backtesting.