Comparison

AI Options Tools: What They Actually Do, and Do Not

By Rohan Fernandes, Founder · Updated 2026-09-06 · Educational reference, not investment advice

AI in options tools mostly does three things well: explains numbers in plain English, summarizes news and filings, and offers a second opinion on a setup. The decisions that matter, which candidates pass, which strikes, when to exit, are still rules and arithmetic in every tool worth using, and the way to judge a product is to ask which of its numbers the AI is allowed to change. In Optionscanner the answer is none.

*How this page was written: from each product's public materials as read in September 2026, and from what Optionscanner does as deployed. Features and prices change; check each site for current details. This is a description of tools, not advice about which to buy or what to trade.*

What AI is good at inside an options tool

Explaining. Turning a probability cone, a skew table or an exit rule into a sentence a newer trader can read. This is where language models are strongest, and it is most of what an assistant should do.
Summarizing. Reading earnings filings, news and analyst actions and pulling out the dated events that matter for a ticker.
Second opinions. A model trained on your own closed trades can say how often setups like this one worked for you. That is a statistic about your history, useful precisely because it is not the same engine.

What AI is not good at, and should not be doing

Choosing strikes or expiries by intuition. Those are arithmetic on live quotes: delta, width, credit, liquidity, days to expiry.
Deciding when to exit. An exit is a rule you wrote in advance meeting a number; a model's mood is not a rule.
Placing orders on its own. Every serious tool keeps a human click between the machine and a live account, and the ones that do not deserve hard questions.

How to tell a rules engine with an AI layer from an AI that trades

Ask three questions of any product:

1. Which numbers can the AI change? In a well-built tool the answer is none; it explains the numbers the engine produced. 2. Can you see the rule behind a decision? If a candidate was rejected, is the reason a named rule and a number, or a paragraph? 3. What reaches a live account without a click? If the answer is anything at all, understand exactly what before you connect an account.

How Optionscanner draws the line

The engine is deterministic: the same inputs produce the same outputs, the thresholds are on screen and editable, and every rejection is logged with the rule and the number. The assistant explains those results, reads your positions and the market, and cites the tool behind every figure it states; it cannot change a score, approve a trade or place an order. The model trained on your closed trades appears as a second opinion beside the grade, labelled as such, and disagreement between the two is shown rather than smoothed over. No order reaches a live brokerage account without your click, in any mode.

The honest caveats

"AI" on a product page tells you nothing about which of these jobs it does. Ask the three questions. And remember that a good explanation of a bad rule is still a bad rule; the rules deserve the same scrutiny as the AI.

Educational reference. Options Scanner is a software tool. It is not a broker-dealer, an investment adviser, or a fiduciary, and nothing on this page is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Options involve risk and are not suitable for every investor; read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading. Examples use hypothetical numbers for illustration only.