The two times we’ve written up a 9:32 AM iron condor, the trade was over before lunch. One stopped out in seventeen minutes . The other hit its target in fifty-three . Both sold a condor at the open and then sat on their hands until the market made the decision for them.
This is a different bot, and May 26 was a different kind of day.
The “9:32 Adjustable $5 Iron Condor” doesn’t sit still. It enters at the same time as its cousins, but it actively rolls the untested side as price drifts, chasing extra credit the whole way. On a session that climbed 23 points and then handed all of it back, that meant three rolls, $1.40 of bonus credit, and a four-hour grind to a clean profit target.
| Entry | Exit | Open Credit | Adj. Credit | Exit Debit | Hold | P&L |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:32 AM · SPX $7,515.63 | 1:46 PM · SPX $7,507.77 | $4.97 | +$1.40 | $3.73 | 4h 14m | +$264 (+53.1%) |
⚙️ What “Adjustable” Changes
Skip this if you’ve read prior posts on this bot. If you haven’t, the design is worth a minute.
The plain 9:32 condor walks to a fixed delta. This one walks to a fixed premium. It wants $5.00 of credit on $25-wide wings, and it sells whatever strikes the chain hands it to get there. Delta floats with implied volatility; the dollar credit is the constant.
That one choice fixes the risk before the trade even fills. Twenty-five-point wings minus $5 of credit leaves $20 of width at risk — ($25 − $5) × 100 = $2,000. That’s the max loss, every time, no matter where the strikes land or how far IV pushes them. You know your worst case at 9:32. In practice the bot never rides it that far; a combined −$1,000 stop pulls the plug long before the structural max.
The profit target is just as mechanical: $250, exactly half the opening credit. Collect about $500 at entry, give back enough that you’re up $250, and the bot is out. No greed, no “let it ride.”
The entry was textbook. SPX sat at $7,515.63 when the order filled. The bot sold the 7480 put and the 7550 call, bought the 7455 and 7575 wings, and booked $4.97 in credit — call it $497 on the contract. Both short strikes roughly 35 points from spot. A wide, comfortable condor with $2,000 of defined risk behind it.
The Three Rolls
This is where the adjustable bot earns its name.
| # | Time (ET) | SPX | vs. Entry | Roll | Credit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 9:46 | $7,527 | +12 | Put 7480 → 7490 | +$0.50 |
| 2 | 10:20 | $7,534 | +18 | Put 7490 → 7500 | +$0.45 |
| 3 | 11:54 | $7,505 | −11 | Call 7550 → 7540 | +$0.45 |
After a quick dip to $7,509.72 at 9:36 — the only time the position was meaningfully red in the morning, briefly −$35 — SPX turned and ran. It tagged $7,520 by 9:42 and $7,527 by 9:46, roughly twelve points above entry and a full two strikes away from the 7480 put. That distance is the trigger. The untested side is the side the market is walking away from, and every point of room there is premium left on the table, so the bot dragged the put spread up: short put 7480 → 7490, +$0.50.
The grind continued. SPX pushed to $7,531 by 10:13 and $7,533.73 by 10:20, another two strikes of drift, and the bot rolled the puts up a second time: 7490 → 7500, +$0.45. Through this whole stretch the position sat comfortably green, +$55 to +$90, while the short put climbed to within striking distance of where we’d entered.
SPX topped out at $7,538.96 at 10:41 — up 23 points on the day — and then rolled over. By 11:54 it had given all of it back and then some, sitting at $7,505, now 45 points below the 7550 call. With the call side suddenly the fat, safe one, the bot rolled it down: short call 7550 → 7540, +$0.45.
Three rolls, $1.40 in fresh credit stacked on top of the $4.97 we opened with.
⚠️ The Catch: Tighter Goalposts
Worth being honest about what rolling costs, because for a few minutes around noon this looked like a losing trade.
Every roll toward the money collects credit, but it also narrows the condor. We opened with the shorts 70 points apart — 7480 put, 7550 call. By the time the second put roll was done, the short put sat at 7500, and the reversal off the 10:41 high walked SPX straight back down into it. At 11:56 the index printed $7,501.62 — 1.6 points above the short put. Combined P&L, which had been sitting near +$90 all morning, swung to −$180 at that low. The third roll (the call coming down to 7540) was firing for $0.45 right as the put side got pressed.
That’s the bill for rolling. We’d spent 70 points of buffer down to 40, and the afternoon move tested exactly the cushion we’d given up. The condor we were defending at noon was a far twitchier thing than the one we sold at 9:32. A few more points lower and the combined stop at −$1,000 comes into play; this is the regime where the adjustment logic can hurt you.
It didn’t, because the move stalled. SPX bounced off 7501, settled into a $7,505–$7,510 range, and stopped threatening the put. From there it was theta’s trade.
The Exit
With SPX parked just above the 7500 short put and both spreads bleeding premium into the afternoon, the position clawed back from that −$180 low through the entire 1 o’clock hour. At 1:46 PM the combined P&L ticked to +$264.50 and crossed the $250 target. The bot bought the whole structure back for a $3.73 debit and closed.
The math, per share:
| Component | Per Share |
|---|---|
| Open credit | $4.97 |
| Adjustment credit | +$1.40 |
| Exit debit | −$3.73 |
| Captured | $2.64 |
That $2.64 per share is $264 on the contract. Against the $4.97 we opened with, that’s +53.1% — a hair past the half-credit target, because the tick that triggered the exit overshot $250 by a few dollars. Four hours and fourteen minutes on risk, versus the seventeen-minute and fifty-three-minute resolutions on the non-adjustable bots. Same entry time, completely different texture.
What the Rolls Are, and Aren’t
It’s tempting to read three well-timed rolls as the bot “calling” the range. It didn’t. It has no view on where SPX is headed. The rolls are mechanical: when the untested side drifts a set distance away, drag it back and collect. On a trending day that same logic rolls you straight into the move and costs you, and some days it will. May 26 chopped, and chop is exactly the regime where rolling the untested side prints near-free credit.
That’s the whole point. The bot isn’t predicting the range — it’s monetizing the market’s indecision while it lasts, with a fixed $2,000 worst case on one end and a $250 target on the other. Some days the roll looks like genius. Some days it’s a paper cut. Over a few hundred of them, it’s just credit.
The edge isn’t in three good rolls. It’s in making the same roll, the same way, the next thousand times.
Related Articles
- The 9:32 AM Iron Condor: A 17-Minute Squeeze and the Cost of Doing Business — same entry slot, the version that doesn’t adjust. It takes its stop and goes home. The cleanest contrast to today’s manage-the-position approach.
- +$388 in 53 Minutes: The Day the 9:32 AM Iron Condor Worked — same slot, a fast profit-target win with no rolls. Read together they show how differently a static condor and an adjustable one spend the same trading day.
- Time Diversification: How Spreading Bot Entries Saved the Day on May 11 — why we run a stack of bots at different times and configs rather than betting the morning on one.
Disclaimer: This log is for educational purposes only. 0DTE options carry significant risk. All trades described here ran in paper-monitoring mode. Always trade within your risk tolerance.