Think of the Options Scanner as your personal night-vision: it helps you pick the right option out from literally thousands. We developed this tool in partnership with iVolatility, aiming for a sleek UI matched to a very powerful, comprehensive scanning engine, and we're pretty pleased with the results.

This guide gives you the deeper-dive, but what I like best about the tool is how elegant it makes the process of scanning. Lots of traders start with scanning (aka screening) to find possible trades, so many of you have already tried plenty of tools for this purpose, at least in the equities world. This one is specially designed to help you uncover hard-to-find options, like missing legs for complex options strategies, or naked/covered puts and calls, or calendar spreads that fit your predictions. You can scan based on the core criteria -- things like moneyness, relative risk or cost -- or plunge in and fine-tune with filters for various Greek levels. Then you can save the whole list of results as a Monitor, re-run it later, or re-run it repeatedly if it's a successful scan for you.  You won't find an options scanner that combines ease AND power to quite the same degree, I'd bet.