Option Samurai Review – Is This Options Scanner Worth Using?

Option Samurai is an options scanning platform that offers both premade and customizable scans. The platform puts user experience first, offering a streamlined design that leaves out a lot of the bells and whistles you can find from other scanners. This makes Option Samurai more approachable for beginner options traders, although experienced traders will still find plenty to like.

So, is this options scanner right for you? Our Option Samurai review will help you decide.

Option Samurai Pricing Options

Option Samurai offers two pricing options: Beginner and Advanced.

The Beginner plan costs $49 per month or $468 per year and includes access to all of the platform’s predefined scans, options strategies, and scan filters. The main limitation is that you can only have two accounts for trade logging. 

The Advanced plan costs $75 per month or $708 per year. It adds unlimited accounts for trade logging and an Excel toolbox for integrating Option Samurai scans with your existing trade idea workflows. It also offers intraday email alerts whenever a new symbol is added to one of your custom scans.

Options Samurai offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

Option Samurai Features

Custom Options Scans

The primary feature that Option Samurai offers is its customizable options scanner. The scanner includes 24 common options strategies and more than 150 filters to narrow your search for trades.

Available strategies include covered call, put and call spreads, straddle, strangle, iron condor, iron butterfly, and collar. For each strategy, you can calculate profit/loss based on current bid-ask prices or based on hypothetical price improvements that might serve as triggers for your trade.

The filters are quite comprehensive. You can filter by expected trade return, the probability of a trade expiring worthless, strike price, intraday options volume, breakeven percent, and much more. The skew rank filter is especially interesting, as this enables you to quickly focus on (or eliminate) companies that have overpriced calls relative to puts or vice versa.

You can also filter companies based on a variety of technical and fundamental metrics. Option Samurai includes data on analyst ratings, upcoming dividend and earnings dates, P/E ratio, and short interest. Technical indicators available for filtering include monthly, quarterly, and YTD performance, volume, RSI, MACD, and Bollinger Bands. 

The platform also offers fundamental, technical, and overall stock scores on a 1-10 scale, which can be useful for creating broad-based scans.

Scan Results

Scan results are presented in an interactive table. You can customize the columns and sort results based on up to two columns at a time. Option Samurai also uses color-coding for key metrics like implied volatility rank to highlight stocks that are most favorable for your strategy. Notably, implied volatility rank is calculated as a percentage relative to historical volatility, making it easier to compare implied volatility rank across stocks.

You can click on any stock to see the legs of the recommended trade and the details for each contract involved. A chart shows profit/loss vs price for both the current day and the trade’s expiration date.

You can save an unlimited number of custom scans to your Option Samurai account to reuse them in the future.

Predefined Scans

Option Samurai offers 44 predefined options scans for you to use. The scans are tagged, making it easy to find the scan you want based on a particular strategy, whether you’re bullish or bearish on the market, and your risk tolerance. Each strategy is well explained, making these predefined scans a great resource for newer options traders.

Trade Log

Option Samurai offers a trade log where you can monitor open options trades and review past trades. This is a relatively new feature, so it’s still in beta and doesn’t have all the analysis tools we’d like to see.

You can leave notes on each trade as well as group trades by strategy, expiration month, or ticker symbol to look for patterns in your trading. However, there are no tools for calculating your overall profit and loss for a group of trades or for assigning custom tags to your trades.

You can create multiple trading accounts within the trade log, but it doesn’t connect to any brokerages. Rather, the only way to import trades into the trade log is to add them from the scanner or enter them manually.

Option Samurai Platform Differentiators

Option Samurai is a very user-friendly options scanner that works equally well for new options traders and experienced traders. While nothing about Option Samurai’s scanner is groundbreaking, the inclusion of 24 different options strategies and more than 150 filters ensures that it’s useful for a wide variety of options traders. The predefined scans are high-quality and are an added bonus for traders who don’t already have a custom strategy in mind.

The trade log feature has the potential to be a major differentiator for Option Samurai, especially if it can help traders actively improve weak points in their trading. However, the trade log is still relatively limited in what it can do for now.

Unsure about Option Samurai? Read some reviews of similar services:

• Unusual Whales Review
• FlowAlgo Review
• InsiderFinance Review
• Cheddar Flow Review
• Market Chameleon Review
• Optionstrat Review
• Optionsonar Review

What Type of Trader is Option Samurai Best For?

Option Samurai is suitable for a wide range of options traders. The platform’s simplicity makes it approachable for new options traders, while the depth of filters and sortable scan results makes it equally useful for more advanced traders. It is important to note that Option Samurai doesn’t let you create fully custom strategies, so it won’t have much to offer unless you trade using one of the popular strategies that this platform supports.

Pros

• Scan for 24 popular options trading strategies
• 150+ technical, fundamental, and options filters
• 44 predefined options scans available
• Extremely easy to use, especially for beginners 
• 14-day free trial

Cons

• Doesn’t let you create and scan for custom options strategies
• Moderately expensive