A new puzzle every day
Daily Options Scenario
Every day the trainer deals one real SPX session from its five-year history — dates masked, four defined-risk vertical spreads priced from historical option quotes, plus the option to stand aside. Read the tape, pick your play, then reveal what actually happened and what it paid. One puzzle a day; yesterday’s stay up below.
Today’s puzzle
Daily Options Scenario #80
Published September 29, 2026. One real SPX session, dates masked, four priced
verticals plus stand aside.
Play today’s scenario
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How to run the drill
The puzzle takes five minutes if you let it. The habit that makes those five minutes worth anything: commit before you peek.
- Read the chart before the table. Fifty sessions of tape, dates masked. Decide what you think it is — trending, chopping, stretched — and which way the next few sessions lean. Write the read down, or at least say it. A read you never committed to is a read you will quietly revise after the reveal.
- Then check the header row. TREND and the 5- and 20-day changes say what the tape has been doing. The VIX level and its direction say what the options market is charging for whatever comes next. EXP is how many sessions your spread gets to be right. A rich VIX fattens the credit spreads and marks up the debit ones — the same opinion can point at a different structure depending on what fear costs that day.
- Pick against the board — or stand aside. The menu is the same five rows every day: bull put and bear call credit spreads, which collect a small premium for being merely not-wrong, and bull call and bear put debit spreads, which pay several times their cost but only if the move actually comes. Standing aside is a scored choice, not a skipped question — some tapes pay nobody.
- After the reveal, grade the read, not the money. Your pick is scored against the whole board, so you always see what the better play paid. A sound read that lost to a gap is worth keeping. A coin flip that cashed is not a process.
Why the dates are masked
Show the date and you are no longer reading a chart — you are remembering the news. Anyone who lived through a headline session recalls how it resolved, and grading recall teaches nothing. Masked, the puzzle leaves you exactly what you would have had at that close: price, trend, and the volatility read. That is the skill being drilled, and it only works blind.
Published puzzles are also pinned: once a day’s scenario is up, it never changes underneath you. Share the link and the other person faces the same board, the same prices, the same reveal.
Where the numbers come from
Every row on the board is priced from the option quotes of the session you are looking at — strikes, entry, max profit, max loss, and breakeven for one contract at the standard ×100 multiplier. Nothing is simulated after the fact: the verticals on offer are the ones that were actually priced there, and the reveal settles them against what SPX went on to do. If defined risk is new to you, start there, then see how strike and width choices set every number on the row before you ever click.
When puzzles post
A new scenario goes up every morning before the U.S. cash open, and recent ones stay playable above — a missed day is a tile, not a hole. Your streak lives in this browser only; there is no account and no signup. If you want more than one rep a day, the practice decks run the same drill ticker by ticker, and the full trainer deals from the complete five-year history.
Go deeper
The daily is the rep; the Learn library is the coaching. Three lessons do the most work here: how vertical spreads actually pay, why size decides whether you survive being wrong, and the mistakes that show up on this board every week. For the header row, reading market context and reading the VIX cover what TREND, REGIME, and the VIX line are actually telling you.
Playbook Trainer is an educational game built on historical market data. Nothing on this page is investment advice or a recommendation to trade. Options involve substantial risk; defined-risk spreads can lose their full maximum loss. Scenario dates are masked, and prices reflect historical option quotes with simplified fills.