Back from a summer break and a long July 4th weekend, Dillon and Ben spend episode 247 of Man and Machine — part of The Pulse on the Tradier Hub — doing something most trading channels avoid: opening up their own automated strategies, wins and losses in plain view, and talking honestly about what’s working and what needed fixing.
The first stop is King AI, a zero-DTE iron condor on SPX that sells premium and collects credit. It launched in September 2025 and, using just $2,000 in cash, it’s up around $2,885 per unit — close to a 150% return. But June was a red month with fewer trades than usual, and there haven’t been any July trades yet. The guys don’t spin it. They compare the live win rate to the roughly 90% the backtest produced, and they’re upfront that live markets throw in variables a backtest never sees.
Then comes King AI Turbo, the more aggressive sibling. It’s still over 100% return on $2,000, but it’s in a drawdown, and June stung. This is where the conversation gets useful. Turbo is built to take more trades and lose more often, with the bet that it recovers faster. The hosts walk through why an 80% live win rate can feel disappointing only because the launch was so hot — a $5,000-plus run with just two losses from Thanksgiving through March set expectations sky-high. As they put it, this is trading; you’re going to be humbled, and the people frustrated in June are usually the ones who switched Turbo on and stopped watching it. There’s a VIX filter that blocks trades when volatility spikes above 30 or gaps up overnight, but no filter makes iron condors easy to run through months of war headlines.
The heart of the episode is Shorebo, their zero-DTE opening range breakout strategy on SPX, and two changes that just went live. First, put credit spread entries now cut off at 11 a.m. Eastern instead of noon — a year of live results showed entries after 11 were hurting them, even though the backtest had suggested otherwise. Second, they removed the hedge entry entirely. The old logic sold a call credit spread when price reversed, trying to soften a losing day, but the live data showed that “white flag” was doing more harm than good. Losses will sting a bit more now, but both sides of the strategy are symmetrical and cleaner. It’s a clear example of the Surgeon’s real risk — a system finely tuned to a market that quietly changed underneath it — and the discipline to re-tune rather than hope.
They wrap with a look at the PeakBot marketplace, which now runs somewhere between 35 and 40 live strategies across equities, options, and futures, with more big-name partners on the way. The week’s economic calendar is light — some auctions, a Fed speech, FOMC minutes midweek that pause a few bots — with the real FOMC event landing at month-end. A reminder threads through the whole thing: it’s called Man and Machine because the bots do the heavy lifting, but you still have to watch your own account.
