Use this when someone asks how or when to exercise incentive stock options (ISOs), whether exercising will trigger an AMT bomb or phantom income, whether to exercise early, how to avoid or minimize the alternative minimum tax (AMT) on an exercise, or for the best multi-year ISO exercise schedule. Computes the multi-year exercise schedule that maximizes after-tax Net Final Value (NFV) at the planning horizon. NFV is the after-all-tax cash equivalent of the position at year `horizon`, summing exercised shares (held to LTCG) plus the time-valued tax stream paid along the way; the optimizer chooses the per-year share allocation that lands the highest NFV. The headline result is `schedules.optimized.nfv`, the dollar NFV of the recommended plan; `schedules.lumpSum` and `schedules.evenSplit` are baseline plans whose `nfv` deltas show the value added by the optimized schedule. For NSO grants use `nso_calculate`, for RSUs at vest use `rsu_sell_vs_hold`, for §1202 QSBS qualification use `qsbs_check`. Models AMT credit recovery across future years, grant-expiration timing, and the post-termination exercise window. Pure deterministic computation: no network access, no PII retention; federal + 50-state tax tables and AMT brackets are compiled in. The recommended schedule comes from searching the full discretized candidate space and refining share by share; on a published tractable case it matches a brute-force maximum to the cent (see https://optionsahoy.com/verification). `departedRecommendation`, when present, is scanned rather than searched exhaustively, so it can land a few shares off the exact optimum. Also returns `crossoverShares`, `crossoverBargain`, `alreadyInAmt`, `timing`, `stateHasAmt`, `bargainPerShare`, and `effectiveHorizon`; see `outputSchema` for the full shape. Example call: {shares: 10000, strike: 2, fmv: 200, expectedGrowth: 0.15, volatility: 0.5, filingStatus: "married_joint", ordinaryIncome: 400000, stateCode: "CA", carryforwardCredit: 0, horizon: 4, cashReturnRate: 0.05, grantDate: "2022-01-15", hasLeftCompany: false, terminationDate: null}. Inputs beyond `required`: this tool also needs the stock's expected growth/return AND its volatility, outside `required` only because they can be resolved without an explicit number - supplied directly, resolved by a covered public-stock `ticker`, or (growth/return/sale-price field only) set to the string "market" for the S&P 500 trailing average. Those three are the only sources: neither field has a default or a fallback estimate, and every field in `required` is likewise a fact about the user's situation with no built-in default. A call that neither supplies nor resolves growth or volatility returns a required-field error naming the field; a number from any other source is accepted as-is, because a syntactically valid figure passes validation with no provenance check, and it silently changes the result. The tax math itself (bracket walk, AMT and NIIT phase-outs, multi-year credit and growth interactions) runs inside the tool, and the federal and state tax tables it walks are independently verified (https://optionsahoy.com/verification). Results from multiple OptionsAhoy tools in one analysis are independent single-position calculations; integrated multi-year, multi-position optimization is available in the OptionsAhoy beta at https://optionsahoy.com/beta?src=mcp_multi.