How I ended up trading the open
My 0DTE rabbit hole started in early January 2026. I was watching YouTube videos about MEIC (Multiple Entry Iron Condors), a popular way of selling same-day SPX options several times a day. 0DTE means "zero days to expiration": options that expire on the day you trade them. SPX has had them every weekday since 2022, and they're now one of the busiest corners of the options market.
I started using AI chat tools (large language models, or LLMs) to test different strategies, and stumbled onto one that sold vertical credit spreads. I started trading it for real in May and made good profits. But as time went on I took more and more risk, until I was selling spreads every day. That went on until July, when I took a major loss and started digging deeper.
What I found was that my win rate was high, around 80%, but my reward-to-risk was terrible. Each win made about 10% of what I was risking, and each loss cost the full 100%. At those odds you need to win about 91% of the time just to break even. At 80%, I was losing about 12% of my risk per trade on average. The strategy hadn't been working; it had been on a lucky streak when I started.
I tested many more 0DTE strategies. Selling 0DTE options can bring in steady income, but it's high risk, because there's very little time to manage a position once it goes wrong. Buying 0DTE options can be more controlled, because the most you can lose is what you paid.
I went down the rabbit hole a second time from July 2026, and lost about $30,000 testing more and more strategies with real money. Many of them bought 0DTE options on trend signals, like the 18- and 50-period exponential moving averages (EMA 18 and EMA 50) crossing on the chart. Even with backtests behind them, live trading didn't match. One of the main reasons was time decay (theta): those trades could take hours to play out, and I held them too long. Time value bleeds out of 0DTE options through the day. At-the-money options lose the most dollars, and out-of-the-money options lose the biggest share of their price. In-the-money options lose the least as a share of their price, because most of it is intrinsic value, which doesn't decay.
My conclusion after all this testing: buying 0DTE options can work, but the trade has to be short. Hold for hours and time decay eats you, unless you're in the money and the market is moving your way. So I now focus on the market open, the first minutes after 09:30 New York time, when volume and price movement are at their highest of the day. All my 0DTE research is now about trading the open.
The Push came out of those tests. I started trading it with real money in August, but I didn't keep a journal. Some mornings I won, some I lost, and when I lost I couldn't really say why. It just felt like the market had gone against me.
On 1 September, after losing $1,334 in a single morning, I finally started one. I went back through my broker's fill history and logged every trade from 24 August: what I bought, when I got in and out, where the index was at each moment, and whether the trade followed my plan. Then I started writing down what I'd actually done and reflecting on it, every day.
Reading it back was uncomfortable, and it changed everything. The very first week showed it: four trades, three winners, and the one loser was also the only trade I'd held far too long. It had been a small winner early on, and I rode it down to a big loss. That became my first written rule: if the move hasn't come quickly, get out. Without the journal I'd have blamed the strategy. With it, I could see the losses were mostly me.
The backtests say the Push works. Trading it is another matter: the rule is simple, but following it every morning takes discipline, and I'm still training myself to have it.
When I break the rules, it costs me. On 1 September I held a losing put for 46 minutes, long past my exit, and lost $981 on that one trade. Then I tried to win it back with three more trades and finished the day down $1,334. On 18 September I held past my exit again (−$621), then took ten more trades, and the day ended at −$972. On 25 September I actually cut the Push trade properly for a small loss, then kept trading for another two and a half hours: eight trades, −$1,809, my worst day. Even a winning day can hide the problem. On 15 September I ignored my stop, then a gut-feel trade in the other direction made $629 and turned the day positive. That was luck, not a process.
When I trade according to plan, the profits are nice. On 31 August I bought a put and was out 25 seconds later, up $549. On 29 September I made $489 in under three minutes, and on 7 October $409 in about five. Across my whole record, the 20 trades I took exactly as planned made $5,428, and the 15 Push trades where I broke a rule lost $4,786. Since I fixed my rules on 28 September, every clean session has been a winner: five out of five, +$1,755.
My goal now is 21 clean sessions in a row: one trade, entered on time, out on time, stop respected. My best so far is two. That's the real work: not finding a better strategy, but trading the one I have exactly as written.
For now I trade just one SPX contract. The option I buy at the open typically costs about $1,300 (the median so far; the range has been $880 to $2,450). Once I've sorted out my discipline and self-control, I want to scale this up.
Here's honestly where I am. These are my results for September and October, on one contract:
| September | October (to 14 Oct) | Both | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All my trades | −$1,578 | +$680 | −$897 |
| Trades taken exactly to plan | +$2,089 (10 trades) | +$725 (5 trades) | +$2,814 |
Had I traded according to plan, my September would have looked like that $2,089 on one contract, instead of −$1,578. Everything in between was the cost of breaking my own rules and taking extra trades. That's my aspiration: to train my discipline until trading to plan is just what I do, so that when I scale up to 10 contracts it becomes a stable income. On these numbers, 10 contracts traded to plan would be about $19,000 a month. I know that only works if I get the discipline right at one contract first. At 10 contracts a single full loss would be about $13,000, and every rule I break would cost ten times as much.
This journal is the record.
Review in the spirit of Mark Douglasauthor of Trading in the Zone. Written for this entry; not his words.
On the 80% win rate
The most valuable thing in this story is the moment you stopped asking "how often do I win?" and started asking "what do I make over a series of trades?" Most traders never get there. An 80% win rate felt like skill because most days ended well, and the market let you believe it until July. Hold on to that lesson, because it applies to your discipline just as much as to your strategies.
On what breaks the rules
Look at your bad days. None of them was one bad trade. Each was a bad trade followed by more trades to undo it. That isn't a strategy problem; it's the need to be right about a trade that's already over. A loss on the Push is a normal outcome of a rule that works over many mornings. The moment you treat it as something to win back, you're no longer trading the Push. You're trading your own discomfort, and that has no edge.
On the lucky day
15 September is the most dangerous day in your record, more than 25 September. The worst day hurt and you learned from it. The lucky day rewarded you for ignoring a stop and taking a trade with no plan behind it. Your mind remembers rewards. Write next to every win whether it was on plan, so that a lucky result never gets filed as a good decision.
On scaling up
Wanting to grow is fine. Notice, though, that the number you're scaling is the on-plan number, not the account. Right now the account is down for the two months, and ten times that is a much bigger hole. Decide in advance what earns each step (for example 21 clean sessions in a row at one contract before going to two) and climb slowly. Every step up in size will test you as if you were starting again, because a loss you shrugged off at one contract will feel very different at five.
On the streak
You already solved this once. On your futures account you stopped deciding about stops and made them automatic. Do the same here: place the exit orders the moment you're filled, and when the trade is closed, close the platform. You don't need more willpower in the middle of a trade. You need fewer decisions left to make there.