A screening tool computes and describes: it evaluates market data against criteria the user configured and reports what passed, what failed, and by how much; nothing in that output is investment advice. A registered investment adviser, by contrast, directs: tells a specific client what to do with their money. The line is functional, not cosmetic, and it decides who is responsible for the decision.
Three properties, all checkable from the outside. The criteria belong to the user: thresholds, risk caps, and structure preferences are configuration, so the tool is executing the reader's own policy, not substituting one. The output states measurements: a line reporting that a spread's credit is 22% of width, above a floor the user set at 20%, is a fact about the world and a setting, and it reads the same to every user with that setting. And the conclusion is left open: nothing in the output claims to know whether the trade belongs in this account, this week, for this person. Software built this way is a calculator with opinions about arithmetic only.
Personalized investment advice is a regulated activity: a registered investment adviser owes fiduciary duties and answers to a regulator precisely because a client hands over judgment. An analytics tool that does not provide advice keeps the judgment, and with it the responsibility, on the user's side of the table. That is not fine print; it changes what the reader is entitled to expect from each. A tool owes correct math, honest data provenance, and stable rules. An adviser owes suitability for a particular person's whole situation, which no screen output, however detailed, ever establishes. Options Scanner sits squarely on the tool side of this line and is not a registered investment adviser; every page of this library carries that framing because it is the operative fact about what the numbers mean.
As an instrument, with the instrument's obligations: understanding what each measure does and does not capture (the purpose of this library), configuring criteria that reflect their own risk tolerance rather than accepting defaults unexamined, and auditing outcomes against forecasts over time. The measure of a good tool is not that its output can be followed blindly, but that its output can be checked, argued with, and overridden with full information. Every number on these pages is built to survive that kind of reader.