Three wins, two losses, net -$23.
That is a 60% win rate, and it produced a losing week. On the same SPX, in the same five sessions, the 2 PM Iron Fly bot made +$1,614. Different entry time, different bot, very different number on the spreadsheet.
This piece is about what 10:30 AM costs you.
The Setup
The bot is a 0DTE iron condor on SPX. Every trading day at 10:30 AM ET, it sells a 20-delta call and a 20-delta put on same-day options, then buys $100-wide wings on each side for protection. After that it does one of three things: it hits its 35% profit target (close when the position has captured 35% of the credit collected), it hits its 50% stop loss (close when the position has lost 50% of the credit), or it force-exits at 1:00 PM ET if neither has fired. No adjustments. No rolling. No human override.
This is the same structure the 9:32 AM Iron Condor bot runs — same delta, same wing width, same profit and stop rules. The only difference is the entry time. That difference matters more than it sounds like it should.
Weekly Performance: May 4–8, 2026
| Date | Short Call / Put | Entry SPX | Credit | Exit SPX | P&L ($) | Exit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 4 (Mon) | 7255 / 7210 | 7,234.67 | $5.75 | 7,220.04 | -$305 | Stop Loss |
| May 5 (Tue) | 7275 / 7225 | 7,256.09 | $5.50 | 7,259.05 | +$195 | Profit Target |
| May 6 (Wed) | 7350 / 7300 | 7,322.57 | $6.25 | 7,339.71 | +$220 | Profit Target |
| May 7 (Thu) | 7395 / 7345 | 7,369.65 | $6.08 | 7,348.82 | -$380 | Stop Loss |
| May 8 (Fri) | 7415 / 7365 | 7,389.69 | $6.75 | 7,392.09 | +$247 | Profit Target |
Weekly total: -$23
Average credit collected: $6.07 on $100-wide wings. That is a number to keep in mind. We come back to it.
Day by Day
Monday, May 4 — The Slow Bleed That Wasn’t Slow at the End
Entry at 10:30 AM, SPX at $7,234.67. The bot sold the 7255 call and the 7210 put for $5.75 credit. SPX needed to stay between those two strikes for the next two and a half hours.
For the first 30 minutes, it did exactly that. SPX oscillated between $7,238 and $7,243, the position drifted between marginally green and marginally red. By 11:00 AM the position was at +10.4% — nothing dramatic, but moving in the right direction.
Then SPX started sliding toward the put side. Between 11:00 and 11:15 AM it drifted from $7,234 down to $7,225 — still 15 points above the 7210 short put, but heading the wrong way. The position sat between -10% and -15% during that stretch. Uncomfortable, not catastrophic.
Then the last four minutes happened.
| Time (ET) | SPX | P/L |
|---|---|---|
| 11:15 AM | $7,225.38 | -14.8% |
| 11:16 AM | $7,226.61 | -10.0% |
| 11:17 AM | $7,226.53 | -13.0% |
| 11:18 AM | $7,223.04 | -32.2% |
| 11:19 AM | $7,220.04 | -53.0% → Stop fired |
Two ticks. The position went from -13% to -53% in two minutes. SPX never even broke the 7210 short put — it stopped 10 points above. But that is what gamma does to a 0DTE iron condor when the underlying gets close to a short strike with a thin premium underneath it. Small price moves become massive option value moves.
Final: -$305 (-53.0%)
Tuesday, May 5 — The Textbook
Entry at 10:30 AM, SPX at $7,256.09. Strikes: 7275 call, 7225 put. Credit: $5.50.
Tuesday was the kind of trade you forget about by Friday. SPX never tested either side. It hovered between $7,250 and $7,260 for the entire 37 minutes the position was open. The 7225 short put was 30 points away the whole time. The 7275 short call was 15 points away. Neither came close.
| Time (ET) | SPX | P/L |
|---|---|---|
| 10:31 AM | $7,255.92 | +6.8% |
| 10:50 AM | $7,250.96 | +18.2% |
| 11:06 AM | $7,258.64 | +34.1% |
| 11:07 AM | $7,259.05 | +35.5% → Profit Target |
Final: +$195 (+35.5%). 37 minutes.
There’s not much to say about days like this. The market does what the bot needs it to do, theta eats the premium, you collect. This is the day that makes the strategy look easy. The other four days of the week are why it isn’t.
Wednesday, May 6 — The Long Drift Up
Entry at 10:30 AM, SPX at $7,322.57 — already 66 points above Tuesday’s exit. Strikes: 7350 call, 7300 put. Credit: $6.25.
Wednesday was the longest hold of the week. The bot ran for 2 hours and 8 minutes — close to the 1:00 PM force-exit, but not quite there. SPX spent most of the session drifting upward from the 7322 entry, climbing toward the 7350 short call but never reaching it. The position oscillated between mildly profitable and briefly negative as SPX tested the upper end of the range.
The closest call came around 11:35 AM when SPX touched $7,343.83 and the position dipped to -2.8%. From 14 points above the short put to 6 points below the short call in 65 minutes. The bot kept holding.
By 12:00 PM, SPX had pulled back to $7,338. By 12:30, it was sitting near $7,340 and the position had climbed to +30%. At 12:38 PM, with SPX at $7,339.71, the profit target fired — 22 minutes before the 1:00 PM force-exit would have closed it anyway.
Final: +$220 (+35.2%). 2 hours 8 minutes.
This is what a “good” Wednesday looks like for this bot. Slow, never threatening, theta does the work, the trade closes at target right before the time limit. The credit was $625, the win was $220. That ratio matters in the context of what we’ll see on Thursday.
Thursday, May 7 — The Profit That Wasn’t
This was the day that hurt.
Entry at 10:30 AM, SPX at $7,369.65. Strikes: 7395 call, 7345 put. Credit: $6.08 — barely six dollars on a hundred-dollar wing.
For the first 80 minutes, the trade did everything right. SPX hovered in the 7365–7375 range, comfortably between the two short strikes. By 11:50 AM the position was at +32.5%. By 11:51, +33.3%. The 35% profit target was sitting right there, two ticks away.
It just never quite got there.
| Time (ET) | SPX | P/L |
|---|---|---|
| 11:50 AM | $7,372.41 | +32.5% |
| 11:51 AM | $7,371.79 | +33.3% |
| 11:55 AM | $7,372.87 | +33.3% |
| 11:59 AM | $7,364.35 | +14.8% |
| 12:00 PM | $7,363.08 | +13.2% |
| 12:01 PM | $7,359.32 | -6.2% |
| 12:07 PM | $7,353.37 | -40.3% |
| 12:12 PM | $7,352.26 | -40.3% |
| 12:13 PM | $7,348.82 | -62.5% → Stop fired |
In 22 minutes, SPX fell from $7,372 to $7,349 — through the 7345 short put. The position went from +33% (a successful trade in any reasonable sense) to -62.5%. The stop fired with SPX 4 points below the short put, the gamma already doing its damage.
The bot did not malfunction. It executed the rules exactly. The rules said: “you didn’t hit 35% profit, so keep holding until you either get to 35% or lose 50%.” The market gave it a shot at 35%, then took it away, then took the stop with interest.
Final: -$380 (-62.5%).
The stop is configured at 50%. Realized loss was 62.5%. That gap matters too. We come back to it.
Friday, May 8 — Quick Win, Tight Strikes
Entry at 10:30 AM, SPX at $7,389.69. Strikes: 7415 call, 7365 put. Credit: $6.75.
Friday was Tuesday’s cousin. SPX briefly poked higher in the first minute (-3.0% intraday low), then settled into a tight range between $7,389 and $7,394 for the next hour. Neither short strike was ever in real danger.
| Time (ET) | SPX | P/L |
|---|---|---|
| 10:31 AM | $7,386.25 | -3.0% |
| 10:32 AM | $7,389.95 | +4.1% |
| 11:08 AM | $7,392.97 | +12.6% |
| 11:42 AM | $7,393.41 | +33.7% |
| 11:43 AM | $7,392.09 | +36.7% → Profit Target |
Final: +$247 (+36.7%). 1 hour 13 minutes.
A clean close to the week. The position never threatened either side, theta did its work, and the bot got out at target. If every day looked like Friday, this would be a different article.
Why a 60% Win Rate Didn’t Save the Bot
This is the part of the article worth sitting with for a minute.
Three winning trades, averaging +$220 each. Two losing trades, averaging -$342 each. Net result on the week: -$23. A bot that hit its profit target on 60% of trades — well above the long-run breakeven win rate that the strategy needs — and still lost money.
The math is the explanation, and the math is built into the rules.
Average credit collected this week: $6.07. That sets two important numbers in motion:
- Profit target = 35% of credit = $212 average win.
- Stop loss = 50% of credit = $303 average planned loss.
Plug those into the standard breakeven equation for a fixed-ratio system: you need wins to cover losses. The breakeven win rate is losses ÷ (losses + wins), or in this case 303 ÷ (303 + 212) = 58.8%.
The bot won 60% of the time this week. That is barely above the breakeven threshold. And it didn’t quite get there because of a second problem: the stop didn’t fire at 50%. Monday’s loss closed at -53.0%. Thursday’s loss closed at -62.5%. When SPX moves fast through a short strike on a 0DTE position with the bot checking prices once per minute, the stop slips. The 50% rule is a target, not a guarantee.
If you re-do the math with the actual loss size from this week (-$343 average) instead of the planned -$303, the breakeven win rate climbs to 343 ÷ (343 + 212) = 61.8%. The bot hit 60%. So the bot lost.
This is what makes the strategy structurally hard. You can be right more often than wrong and still bleed slowly. The math doesn’t care about feeling good about the win rate.
The 10:30 AM Problem
So why is the credit only $6 in the first place? On the same instrument, the 9:32 AM iron condor bot — same 20-delta short legs, same $100 wings, same profit and stop targets — was collecting $9 to $10 in credit on similar days. Same bot architecture, same SPX, very different premium.
The answer is in how implied volatility behaves through the morning.
SPX implied vol is highest at the open and decays sharply through the first 30 to 60 minutes. The market is digesting overnight news, gap moves, futures positioning, anything that happened in Asia or Europe. Bid-ask spreads on options are wide, the options pricing model is leaning hard on uncertainty, and a seller can collect a meaningful premium in exchange for taking that uncertainty on.
By 10:30 AM, most of that uncertainty has resolved. Price discovery has happened. The intraday range is already established. IV has compressed.
This week’s IV readings on the bot’s short strikes confirm it: call-side IVs ran 12.3%–14.0%, put-side 16.2%–18.5%. Those are modest readings. They translate to modest credits. And modest credits on $100 wings translate to a math problem you can’t outrun with a respectable win rate.
The 9:32 AM bot is selling premium into the morning’s uncertainty. The 10:30 AM bot is selling premium after the market has already priced it correctly. One of those is a structural edge. The other is what the data on this page looks like.
What This Week Says About the Bot
A 60% win rate that produces -$23 is not a tragedy. It is also not noise. On a friendlier week — one without a Thursday-style late-session reversal through the put strike — the bot would have closed positive. On a week with two of those, it would be down four or five hundred dollars. The structural disadvantage of thin credit is asymmetric: it caps your upside on good weeks and amplifies your damage on bad ones.
Three things would change the math without changing the structure:
- Move the entry earlier. Capture the morning IV before it compresses. The 9:32 AM version of this same bot demonstrably collects more premium. (See the 9:32 AM survival recap for what that looks like in practice — a position that touched -42% twice and still hit profit target, because the credit was thick enough to absorb the swings.)
- Widen the wings. $100 is a choice, not a law. $150 wings would collect more credit and require a wider intraday range to hit max loss.
- Change the profit/stop ratio. A 50% PT against a 100% SL inverts the breakeven calculation — you only need ~33% win rate to break even. The trade-off is fewer winners and bigger losers.
This bot does none of those. It enters at 10:30 with $100 wings and a tight 35/50 ratio, and it accepts the math that comes with that combination. Last week, the math came out to -$23.
Next week may be different. The math will be the same.
Related Reading
- 0DTE SPX Iron Fly Recap: The Discipline of Probability (May 4–8) — same week, same SPX, the 2 PM bot that made +$1,614
- Three Days, One Bot: +$322, +$326, -$618 — same iron condor structure entered at 9:32 AM, three-day weekly log
- How a 9:32 AM Iron Condor Survived the Open and Hit 35% — what selling into morning IV looks like when the trade nearly fails
- 0DTE SPX: Same Strategy, 30 Minutes Apart, Completely Different Story — a deeper look at why entry timing and stop placement matter
- Iron Condor: The Complete Strategy Guide — the strategy this bot trades, end to end
- 0DTE Options Trading: The Complete Guide — everything about same-day expiration strategies
- Why We Sell Premium Instead of Buying It — the statistical edge behind the approach, and why thin credit erases it
Trade logs from a mechanical bot in monitoring mode on SPX. 10:30 AM entry, 20-delta short strikes, $100 wings, 35% profit target, 50% stop loss, 1:00 PM force exit. Not financial advice.