SIFTed started the way a lot of tools do: someone building the thing they needed.
We come at this from ordinary investing — index funds and large-cap names, money going in every month, nothing clever. It worked, and it was completely passive. Selling options reframed that. Not as a replacement; the majority of what we hold is still in the same broad funds it always was. But the idea that you could be paid a premium for an obligation you were willing to take on anyway changed what we did with the rest.
The lessons came slowly, and partly through losses that stung enough to remember. What came out of them was a set of rules — the conditions actually worth waiting for, rather than the ones that merely look good on a screen.
Turning rules into a scanner
Rules kept in your head get applied well when you have time and badly when you do not. So we wrote ours down properly and used AI tooling to help build a scanner around them — one that reads an options chain and scores every contract the same way, every time, on delta, implied volatility, premium yield, liquidity and how the underlying is behaving, along with the market context around it.
The goal was consistency, not cleverness. A rule you apply only when you remember is not really a rule.
Built for people with jobs
We work normal hours. We cannot watch positions during the day, and we kept finding setups a day after they would have been worth looking at. SIFTed runs the screen so nobody has to sit on one — and it turns out a lot of people are in exactly that position: interested, informed enough, and short on time.
What SIFTed is, and is not
It is a screener. You choose the criteria; it reads the market, scores what it finds on a 0–100 scale, and shows you everything that matched and everything it filtered out. It does not connect to your brokerage, it cannot place an order, and it never tells you what to buy.
We are not financial advisers and SIFTed is not an advisory service. We do not publish our own positions, and we do not answer questions about what anyone should do with their money — your situation is not ours.
Everything the screen has ever produced is kept, including the results that went badly. Published alerts cannot be edited or deleted; that is enforced by the database, not by policy. A track record you can quietly tidy up is not a track record.