Futures get most of the attention around here, but a chunk of the account runs a much slower strategy: selling cash-secured puts on index ETFs and large caps — the front half of “the wheel.” We’ve been running it live, automated, for months. Here is the honest report card, because it is not the one the wheel-selling influencers give you.
The pitch versus the ledger
The pitch: collect premium every week, and either keep the cash or get assigned stock at a discount you already agreed to. Win-win, supposedly. The ledger after months of live, automated selling: roughly flat. Not a disaster — but not the effortless income stream it gets sold as, either.
Why the easy money isn’t
- You collect pennies in calm markets and hand them back in fast ones. Put selling is short volatility: the weeks that pay you are the weeks you didn’t need the money, and the week that hurts takes several winners with it.
- Assignment clusters at the worst time. You get put the stock precisely when everything is falling — which is also when the “discount” you locked in stops looking like one.
- Stale quotes will lie to you. A practical trap we hit with broker data: options marks based on a prior day’s close can be wildly wrong after a gap. If your bot quotes premium off a stale mark, it will happily sell risk for a fraction of its worth. Sanity-check every quote against a model before trusting it.
Where options data has earned its keep
The most valuable thing the options market gives our trading isn’t premium — it’s information. Dealer gamma positioning, computed from open interest, drives the daily NQ/ES levels in the sidebar of this site and tells us which regime the index is in before the session opens. That pipeline is documented in Dealer Gamma Levels Without Paying for Options Data.
The verdict so far
Premium selling stays on as a small, systematic sleeve — it teaches market structure and the flat result is real data, not failure. But if you’re choosing where an active trader’s attention goes, the futures strategies on the scoreboard have earned it more. As always: not advice, size small, and read the risk disclaimer.
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