Free tools · Options
Option payoff calculator — chart any strategy’s profit and loss
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Short answer
An option strategy’s expiry payoff is the sum of its legs: each long call pays max(spot − strike, 0) minus premium, each long put max(strike − spot, 0) minus premium, and short legs the mirror image. Add up to four legs below — calls and puts, buys and sells, any strikes — and this calculator draws the combined payoff curve and computes max profit, max loss and breakeven points for the structure.
Net premium
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Max profit
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Max loss
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Breakeven(s)
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Payoff at expiry only — before expiry, time decay and implied volatility move the position’s value. Transaction costs are excluded. Check current NSE lot sizes before scaling quantities.
Reference: payoff of common option structures at expiry
Per unit — multiply by lots × lot size. Build any of them above to see the shape.
| Structure | Legs | Max profit | Max loss | Breakeven |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long call | Buy call | Unlimited | Premium paid | Strike + premium |
| Long put | Buy put | Strike − premium (spot to zero) | Premium paid | Strike − premium |
| Short call (naked) | Sell call | Premium received | Unlimited | Strike + premium |
| Short put (naked) | Sell put | Premium received | Strike − premium | Strike − premium |
| Bull call spread | Buy lower call, sell higher call | Strike width − net debit | Net debit | Lower strike + net debit |
| Bear put spread | Buy higher put, sell lower put | Strike width − net debit | Net debit | Higher strike − net debit |
| Short straddle | Sell ATM call + ATM put | Total premium | Unlimited | Strike ± total premium |
| Short strangle | Sell OTM call + OTM put | Total premium | Unlimited | Call strike + premium / put strike − premium |
| Iron condor | Short strangle + bought wings | Net credit | Wing width − net credit | Short strikes ± net credit |
Every option structure — straddle, strangle, bull call spread, iron condor — is just legs added together, and the payoff diagram is the honest picture of what you have actually built: where it profits, where it bleeds, and where the losses stop being capped. Traders who cannot draw their position’s payoff are trading a shape they have not seen.
Add each leg with its type, direction, strike and premium. The chart updates as you type, with breakevens and the profit region marked. Quantities default to one lot of NIFTY-scale size, but any quantity works — the shape is what matters.
Reading a payoff diagram
The horizontal axis is where the underlying settles at expiry; the vertical axis is your profit or loss there. Flat segments mean the structure’s value no longer changes with spot — capped profit or capped loss. Sloped segments mean open-ended exposure: a naked short call’s payoff keeps falling as spot rises, which is the picture that explains why option selling without wings demands respect. Breakevens are where the curve crosses zero — between them (or beyond them, for long volatility structures) is where the trade actually pays.
Classic shapes to recognise: a long straddle is a V flipped upside down for the seller; a bull call spread is a rising ramp between two flats; an iron condor is a plateau of limited profit flanked by two limited-loss cliffs. Build each one below once and the shapes stay with you.
What an expiry payoff does not show
This chart is the position at expiry only. Before expiry, the position’s value also moves with time decay and implied volatility — a long straddle can lose money for weeks while spot sits still, exactly as its flat-looking payoff warns but its daily P&L makes visceral. For pre-expiry behaviour, the Greeks are the right lens: pair this tool with the Black-Scholes calculator to see Theta and Vega on each leg.
It also excludes costs. A four-leg iron condor is eight executed orders round trip, plus STT on sell-side premium, exchange charges on every leg, and slippage on entry and exit — on a structure whose maximum profit is the net premium, these are not rounding errors. The brokerage calculator prices the cost side; a serious evaluation of any recurring structure needs both.
From one payoff to a tested strategy
A payoff diagram shows one trade at one expiry. Whether selling that iron condor every Thursday made money across the last five years of NIFTY — through trending months, crashes and volatility spikes — is a different question entirely, and the only honest way to answer it is backtesting the rule, not admiring the shape.
INDfolio AI turns option structures like the ones you build here into systematic strategies: strike selection by offset or premium, per-leg stops, expiry handling, and backtests on NSE options history with the full Indian cost stack deducted per leg. The payoff you like is a hypothesis; the backtest is the evidence.
These calculators are free, run entirely in your browser, and store nothing. They produce estimates for NSE trades based on published rates and standard formulas — not investment advice, and not a substitute for your broker’s contract note. INDfolio AI builds algo trading software; the honest connection is that our backtests apply this same cost arithmetic to every simulated trade.