Pay a dime.
Aim for the pin.
Every morning Butterfly Guy buys one out-of-the-money SPX butterfly that expires the same afternoon, parked in the direction the market gapped. It costs about a tenth of its width. If SPX settles near the middle strike it pays ~10× what it cost. Most days it doesn't — the few that do carry the rest.
Build today's butterfly
Pick the opening gap and the VIX. The lab runs the bot's own selection rules on a modeled 0-DTE chain and shows what it would buy — or why it would sit out.
| Strike | Bid | Mid | Ask | Order |
|---|
Prices are modeled (Black-Scholes, time left from the entry window to the close, flat vol scaled from the VIX) to show the mechanics — not live quotes, and real skew shifts them. The selection mirrors the bot: center within ± pts of the VIX target, cost under the per-width cap, reward:risk of at least 8:1, closest to 10:1, wider wing on ties.
How a day runs
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01 · open
Read the gap
Compare SPX with yesterday's close. Gapped up: buy a call fly above the market. Gapped down: a put fly below it.
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02 · size
Let the VIX set the tent
The VIX regime picks three wing widths. Each gets a center 0.25σ / 0.5σ / 0.75σ of the VIX-implied daily move away from spot.
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03 · 10:00–10:45 ET
Only buy it cheap
Take the fly closest to 10:1 that costs at most 10% of its width. One trade a day, one contract. Worst case: lose the debit.
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04 · manage
Trail the peak
Once it's been green, exit if its value falls this far below its high. Otherwise it rides to the 4:00 settle.
60%9:30–11:30 90%11:30–1:30 75%1:30–4:00
Aug 3, 2026 · Call fly 7,575 / 7,600 / 7,625
Paid $209. Came back as $2,497. One day like this covers a long run of small misses — which is the whole design.
Paper trading only — no real money is behind these trades. The rules and limits on this page are read from the bot's live configuration each time the page is built. This explains a trading experiment; it is not investment advice.