Episode 231 of Man and Machine — part of The Pulse on the Tradier Hub — is the closest the show gets to a build-log. Dillon and Ben spend real time under the hood of a brand-new bot, own up to a rare rough patch on their flagship strategies, and turn a look at a boring blue-chip into a patient income game plan.
The stock in real life is Verizon (VZ), and it’s a dividend story. With a yield around 6% and a payout near $0.70 a quarter, the guys sketch out how a high-yield name like this can work harder than it looks: roughly $280 a year in dividends per 100 shares before any share appreciation, and more if you sell covered calls on top. Ben, who admits he was “obsessed with dividend-capture strategies” before PeakBot existed, lays out a patient accumulate-on-dips plan — add shares below a set level, hold through the noise, collect the dividend every quarter, and let covered calls and slow appreciation compound. AT&T (T) gets a quick side-by-side as a similar, slightly lower-yielding option. It’s not a fast trade; it’s a long-game income thesis.
The centerpiece is Gatekeeper, a new category of strategy for PeakBot that’s just entered beta and is showing up in users’ accounts. Unlike the flagship SPX condors, Gatekeeper is a rules-based, conditional-logic strategy on SPY. It’s momentum-driven and cascading — it can stack up to seven at- or near-the-money positions in a single direction on a given day, managed with OCO orders and modest 10–20% profit targets, aiming for quick “base hits” rather than home runs. It leans on AI to sift tens of thousands of data points for end-of-day momentum patterns that line up with real market structure, but the day-to-day execution is rule-based, not live-AI guesswork. Ben walks through the backtest (built back to when 0DTE options became available on SPY in 2022) alongside live trades from his own account, and previews two more bots on the way: Crossfire, a mean-reversion strategy, and DFlow, a macro order-flow strategy.
The honesty extends to the flagship bots. For the first time in a long while, King AI — the 1DTE iron condor on SPX — is in a rough stretch, losing two of three recent trades and posting its first real red month, though it’s still up roughly $2,400 (around 120–125% on $2,000) since its September launch. King AI Turbo is up near $3,500 but has cooled from an overheated run back toward what the backtest predicts. Dillon is candid that his own money is in King AI, not Turbo, right now, and that anyone who started at the March peak is understandably clenching their teeth. The recurring lesson: trade the strategies as a group, because while the condors struggled, Shorebo quietly went five-for-five and is up over 300% on cash in 2026.
They close with a quiet economic calendar and the usual reminder — the bots keep running, the market’s been chaotic, and trading through it by hand is a brave choice. (For context, this session aired May 11 but is a re-post of an April “420” show.)
