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.

Two portfolios, two time horizons

• 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 Portfolio (5 DTE) — $50,000 of virtual capital. Opens short-dated CSPs each Monday expiring that Friday, up to 5 positions. Weeklies run to expiration — theta decay is steepest in the final days, so there are no profit-target exits, only defensive ones.

The two books are fully independent — separate capital, separate rules, and the same stock can appear in both.

How Monday selection works

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 sizing — How many new trades open each week is driven by the VIX regime: calm markets deploy more, fearful markets deploy less, automatically.
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; weeklies only close early 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.

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.