A systematic, data-driven approach to monthly income from selling SPX and single-stock options. Mechanical rules. No discretion. No bullshit.
I started selling options in 2013. In the years since, I've watched countless retail traders blow up their accounts chasing setups they didn't understand, watched financial influencers sell expensive courses with no real track record, and watched institutional desks execute simple, mechanical strategies that consistently outperformed everything the retail world was chasing.
The strategy in this playbook is one of those institutional approaches. It's not new. It's not clever. It does not depend on predicting markets, timing entries with technical wizardry, or finding the next breakout. What it requires is discipline, capital, and the willingness to follow rules even when your gut tells you otherwise.
The gap between what works and what gets sold is enormous.
Every parameter has been backtested over 13 years and 1,967 individual SPX trades. Every rule has been tested in bull markets, bear markets, and volatility regimes from VIX 9 to VIX 80. There is nothing in this playbook that I am not actively running myself today.
I wrote this because of that gap. If reading this saves you from one of the courses I keep seeing advertised, I'll consider it worth the effort.
The Playbook is structured as two parallel income engines: an SPX core that runs on a fixed weekly schedule, and an optional single-stock module that adds diversified premium harvest on top. Five parts cover everything from the foundations to live operations.
What options actually are. Why selling premium has a documented edge. The Greeks that matter for systematic premium selling — explained without unnecessary jargon.
The core engine. Three weekly entries at delta 0.16, 45 DTE, with mechanical exits and a structural tail hedge. Every parameter justified by backtest data.
The diversification engine. RSI-based oversold setups within confirmed uptrends. Sector caps, earnings filters, and the screening discipline that separates clean entries from falling knives.
The full 13-year backtest with methodology disclosed. Year-by-year P/L breakdown. The 2020 COVID stress test. Single-stock module results separately reported.
The operational layer that turns rules into results. Weekly routines, pre-trade checklists, common mistakes, and a structured 90-day onboarding plan.
The strategy is jurisdiction-agnostic. The tax treatment is not. Structured overview of major frameworks — U.S. Section 1256, German Termingeschäfte rules, UK CGT, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and more.
Strategy rules are only as credible as the evidence behind them. Here are the headline numbers from the full backtest — methodology fully documented in Part IV.
One of the most recent SPX core entries: opened on April 20, closed by automated GTC ten days later at exactly 50% of credit captured. The kind of boring outcome the strategy is engineered to produce.
Get the playbook. Add the live trading group. Or just join the group to see how the strategy runs in real time before committing to the book.
All purchases include EU VAT where applicable. The Playbook is a digital download and all sales are final. The Live Group is a monthly subscription, cancel anytime.
The Playbook is calibrated for accounts of $250,000 or more, with Portfolio Margin enabled. Below that threshold the per-contract margin requirements make the operational sizing impractical, and the hedge structure becomes inefficient at small scale.
Without Portfolio Margin (i.e., on a Reg-T account), you would need approximately 2.5× more capital to run the same contract sizing, so a $625k+ account becomes the practical floor.
Any broker that offers Portfolio Margin and SPX index options will work. The Playbook references Schwab thinkorswim throughout because that is what I run, but Interactive Brokers (PM), Tastytrade (PM), and others work equivalently. The mechanics are identical across platforms; only the UI differs.
I run this strategy with my own capital. The trade examples in the Playbook are real closed positions, with their actual fill prices and trade IDs. Live results since 2024 have closely tracked the backtest expectations within a 5–15% conservatism band.
The Live Group tier shows the strategy in real time — every entry, every exit, every hedge purchase as it happens.
On a $500,000 base running the SPX core + hedge, the 13-year average is approximately 39% per year — roughly 3% per month gross of taxes. Adding the single-stock module historically contributed an additional 5–10 percentage points per year in favorable regimes.
Individual months range widely. Some months produce 5%+, others produce zero or small negatives. The strategy is built around a steady annual return, not a steady monthly one. Anyone promising you steady monthly returns above 2% with no losing months is selling you something they do not actually trade.
This is the most counter-intuitive rule in the entire strategy, and I dedicate a full chapter to explaining it. The short version: I tested every stop-loss level from 1× to 3× credit across the 13-year backtest, and in every case adding a stop loss reduced overall returns.
Naked puts are mean-reverting. When the underlying drops, the put price spikes — often dramatically. A stop loss exits at the spike, locking in the loss. Days later, the underlying recovers, and the put price collapses. The trade that hit the stop would have hit the take profit. The 21 DTE time exit provides time-based risk control without these premature exits.
It depends entirely on your jurisdiction, and tax treatment varies dramatically. The Playbook contains a full chapter (Chapter 20) covering U.S. Section 1256 treatment, German Termingeschäfte rules, UK CGT vs. trading income, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and other major frameworks.
Get qualified local tax counsel before deploying capital. The strategy is jurisdiction-agnostic; the tax treatment is not.
SPX core only: approximately 3 hours per week. With the single-stock module added: 5–7 hours per week, depending on book size. Most of that time is the daily 10-minute entry workflow plus a one-hour Saturday review.
It is not a passive strategy, but it is far from a full-time commitment.
The Playbook is a digital PDF and all sales are final. Once delivered, refunds are not available. This is standard practice for digital downloads.
The Live Group is a monthly subscription, so you can cancel anytime, no commitments. If you want to see the strategy in action before committing to the Playbook, the Live Group is the better starting point.
Yes. Every Playbook purchase includes lifetime updates. As the strategy evolves and as I incorporate feedback, new revisions are released free of charge to all existing readers.
v1.0 was released in 2024. v2.0 added the early single-stock module. v3.0 refined the SPX core. v4.0 (current) brought back the single-stock module with tightened screening rules and added the multi-jurisdiction tax chapter.
Thirteen years of evidence. A complete operational manual. The same system I run with my own capital. Available now.
Get the Playbook · $979