Opty AI Trader is a wheel strategy portfolio managed by AI under hard, deterministic risk rules. It selects cash-secured puts, monitors every position daily, sells covered calls on assignments, rolls threatened trades on Fridays, rescues underwater positions, and records every trade in a real, public trade journal. The AI proposes; fixed rules constrain what it's allowed to do; and a human reviews every trade before it goes live.

The books

• Weekly Ladder (~10 DTE) — the flagship book, and the default tab. Entries are spread across Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, each cohort of CSPs targeting the following Friday — roughly ten days out — so expiries ladder instead of all landing at once. Up to ten positions across the two live cohorts, sized as a percentage of the account's live equity, with profit exits when most of the premium has been earned early.
• Monthly Portfolio (30–45 DTE) — $250,000 of virtual capital. Opens CSPs targeting ~35 days to expiration, up to 8 positions, with sliding profit targets (50–80% of max premium depending on time remaining) that close winners early and redeploy.
• Weekly (5 DTE, archived) — the original Monday-to-Friday book. It is being wound down — existing positions resolve, no new puts open — and its full track record stays on the page, because a fresh start does not mean a hidden history.

The books are fully independent — separate capital, separate rules, and the same stock can appear in more than one.

Traded at a real broker

The Weekly Ladder is not just a spreadsheet: every approved trade is also placed on a real brokerage paper account, so fills, prices and account balance come from a live broker rather than our own arithmetic. The account started at $100,000 — the same number the book shows — and a daily reconciler compares the book against the broker and raises an alarm on any drift. The virtual book remains the record of truth; the broker account is the reality check running beside it.

How selection works

The Weekly Ladder looks for entries Monday through Wednesday; the Monthly book fills open slots on Mondays. Every entry runs the same pipeline:

1. Candidate screening — The full screener universe is filtered by wheel quality, IV rank, liquidity, price range, and an earnings buffer (no earnings before expiry).
2. Chain analysis — For each candidate, Opty fetches the live options chain and keeps strikes in an out-of-the-money band that widens or tightens with the VIX — calmer markets allow closer strikes, fearful markets demand wider ones.
3. AI decision — The AI picks the best trades from the filtered chains and writes a plain-English rationale for each. It only ever chooses from real, verified chain data — never from memory.
4. VIX-scaled deployment — How much capital is working is driven by the fear & greed model: the target rises with the VIX, because fear is when premium is richest. Calm markets keep more powder dry; fearful ones lean in — automatically, and by the same table the gauge on the screener displays.
5. Human approval — Every proposed trade goes to a pending queue and is reviewed before it's committed. Nothing trades itself into the portfolio.

The money rules

The AI trades under a strict allowance — hard rules it cannot override:

• The bag limit — If more than 40% of a portfolio's capital is sitting in assigned shares, no new CSPs open until shares get called away. No digging deeper holes.
• Volatility-scaled sizing — The jumpier a stock is, the fewer contracts the AI may sell on it.
• Yield floor — Trades that don't pay enough annualized get skipped. Capital never gets parked for pennies.
• The slow-down rule — After a losing week, new deployment is halved the following week.
• Averaging down — once — If an assigned stock falls 10%+ below its assignment strike, the AI may sell ONE additional put at the lower level. Once per stock, one contract, never through earnings.

Daily monitoring

After each trading day, the AI reviews every open position. Healthy positions are held. The monthly portfolio closes winners early at its sliding profit targets; the Weekly Ladder takes profit exits once most of the premium has been earned ahead of schedule, and otherwise closes early only defensively. Expiries are resolved against the official closing price — a hard price guard verifies every expired/assigned call the AI makes, so a wrong AI judgment can never book a wrong outcome.

Friday rolls

Every Friday afternoon — while the market is open — the AI checks its expiring puts. If one is losing by just a little (within 5% of the strike), it can roll: buy back the expiring put and sell next cycle's, but only for a net credit. The AI is never allowed to pay to roll, can roll the same trade at most twice, and never rolls across earnings. Deeper losses take assignment — that is the wheel working as designed.

🛟 Recovery Mode

When an assigned stock drops far below its cost basis, near-dated calls at that basis pay almost nothing — dead money. Recovery Mode does what experienced wheel traders do: it sells a call several months out, at or above the cost basis, collecting real premium today. The strike never goes below basis, so no loss can be locked in, and being called away closes the whole cycle at a gain. Out in time, not down in price. Recovery positions carry a 🛟 badge and are held to expiration.

The Journal — every trade, public and auditable

The Journal tab on the AI Trader page opens the AI's real trade journal — the exact same journal tool members use for their own trades, with the exact same math. Three read-only tabs:

• Opty AI Weekly and Opty AI Monthly — every trade each portfolio has ever made: premiums, buybacks, assignments, P/L per trade, win rate, and capital deployed. Every stat has a plain-English tooltip explaining exactly what it counts.
• Jim's Live Trading — the founder's real brokerage trades, side by side with the AI that learned his playbook. Human vs. machine, same math, may the best trader win.

If the AI's numbers are good, you'll see it. If they're bad, you'll see that too — that's the point.

How a closed trade is scored

Each closed trade shows Net P/L — the option premium and the profit or loss on the shares, added together. On a wheel those are two halves of one trade: an assignment turns your cash into stock, and that stock is sold at a gain or a loss when the covered call is exercised. Where the shares moved the number, the card shows the split beneath it, so you can see how much came from premium and how much came from the stock.

Two honesty markers you may see on a closed trade:

• Resolution disputed — the recorded closing price disagrees with how the trade was booked. These are older trades from before we switched to pulling the official close for the exact expiry date, and we show them as originally booked rather than quietly restating history.
• Stock leg unresolved — the trade is marked closed but shares were never sold, so the figure beside it counts premium only and is incomplete. Rather than show a confident number, it says so.

Opty AI is in beta. Numbers on the AI Trader page can change as we correct mistakes and improve how it trades — the Decision Log on that page is the unedited record of every call it made, including the ones it got wrong.

Access

• Members — Full access: both portfolios, live positions, the full journal, and Jim's live trades.
• Guests — See a sample portfolio. Sign up free to watch the real trades live.