What is an OOC (Options-Opportunity-Cycle)?
Last updated: 2026-05-14
What is an OOC (Options-Opportunity-Cycle)?
The OOC — Options-Opportunity-Cycle — is OPTOMON's unit of work. It is the full lifecycle of a trade idea, from the moment a screener result catches your eye to the day you write it up after closing. A Position is only the middle of that arc; an OOC is the whole arc, with provenance preserved at every stage.
If you've used other platforms, you've probably had three half-tools: a Watchlist (passive interest), a Position (live exposure), and a journal entry somewhere off-platform. The OOC replaces all three with one record that survives every transition.
The 7-stage lifecycle
Every OOC moves through these stages, in order. Skipping is allowed (you can fast-track a Spawn straight to Open if the trade is obvious), but the trail is always recorded.
- Spawn. Something — a screener hit, an alert, a manual entry, an advisor suggestion — creates the OOC. At this point it is just a ticker + a strategy hypothesis. No commitment, no Greeks yet.
- Evaluate. You open the Eval Workspace at
/opportunities/[id]and look at the scorecard: spot, IV rank, HV, IV/HV spread, plus a hypothetical Optimeter showing where this trade would sit if you opened it now. Nothing is staged yet. - Stage. You pick a strategy template (Covered Call, CSP, Vertical Credit Put, Iron Condor, Diagonal Call), fill in strikes / expirations, and persist the candidate ticket. Still no order: the ticket lives in OPTOMON, gated behind your Flight Plan's approval bands.
- Open. The trade is submitted via the Trade Path
and filled. This is the moment a Position exists. The OOC's
userEntrymarker locks in. - Manage. The trade is live. The Optimeter renders the real trajectory, alerts fire on zone transitions, advisors can draft suggestions (subject to your approval bands).
- Close. The trade exits — at your set exit, at a forced-exit threshold, or at expiration. The Position dissolves; the OOC does not.
- Post-mortem. A short structured debrief: what was briefed (Stage intent), what happened (Manage signals), what was decided (Close reason). Attached to the OOC's audit trail. See Post-Trade Debrief — the discipline is direct skydiving carryover.
OOC vs. Position
A Position is the broker's record of open exposure: shares, contracts, fill prices, current mark. It comes into being at Open and is gone at Close. It is a span of about 4 stages out of 7.
An OOC is the idea around the position. It exists before the order is placed (Spawn / Evaluate / Stage) and after the order is closed (Post-mortem). When you re-spawn the same setup three months later, the new OOC links back to the previous OOC's debrief — so your learnings are preserved.
If the Position is the flight, the OOC is the flight plan + flight recorder + debrief packet taken together.
OOC vs. Watchlist
A Watchlist entry is a ticker you want to keep an eye on. It has no hypothesis, no strategy, no projected lifecycle, no scorecard. It is passive interest.
An OOC has an active hypothesis: "I think this is a Covered Call setup because IV rank is 68 and earnings is 41 days out." The hypothesis is recorded at Spawn and is what the Evaluate / Stage / Post-mortem stages test. A Watchlist asks "what's it doing?"; an OOC asks "is the thesis I committed to still true?"
A Watchlist is one row. An OOC is a folder.
Why the discipline matters
The 7-stage shape mirrors the Pre-Trade Briefing → Stable Posture → Post-Trade Debrief cadence that survives every other professional trader playbook. Spawning without Evaluating is the equivalent of jumping without a Dirt Dive — sometimes you walk away; eventually you don't. OPTOMON tracks the cycle because which shortcut you took becomes a feature of the debrief, and the debrief is how next year's OOC improves.