Numbers are easy to claim and hard to back up. In episode 251 of Man and Machine, part of The Pulse on the Tradier Hub, PeakBot’s Dillon and Ben bring on one of their longest-running partners — Nick from Bull Tradefinder — and put a real automated track record on the table: nearly 100% return on a $5,000 portfolio since last November, with an 88–89% win rate on credit spreads.
Nick has been automating his credit spread strategy through PeakBot for about two and a half years, which makes him one of the first traders the platform ever copied. What makes the conversation useful isn’t the headline return — it’s how plainly he talks about the losing stretches. June 2026 was his worst month for spreads in over seven years of trading. He doesn’t dodge it. He explains it, owns the mistakes, and points to the equity curve that recovered right after. That’s the honest version of copy trading most channels skip.
His options approach is about as rules-based as it gets. Nick trades zero-DTE credit spreads on names like QQQ, SPY, and SPX, built around mean reversion. He waits until about 10:30 a.m. Eastern — roughly an hour after the open — to see what the market actually wants to do, then sells strikes just under a 10 delta. His stop loss sits around 200–250% of the credit he takes in, so a 10-cent entry gets cut around 30–35 cents. He’s blunt about the goal: not home runs, just consistent compounding, waiting for the right setup instead of forcing one.
The “stocks in real life” segment digs into QQQ, and it doubles as a quick education piece. The guys walk through the fund’s history — it started trading March 10, 1999 — how its top ten holdings make up about half the ETF’s weight, and how Invesco rebalances it automatically. The bigger market read is about memory names. With MU and the rest of the semiconductor complex under pressure, and the Kospi getting halted repeatedly, Nick ties the weakness in memory directly to the drag on the Q’s, with ASML and TSM both reporting that week.
From there the show previews something new: Nick’s futures strategy, which PeakBot is getting ready to automate. He’s been trading MES lately over MNQ because the setups feel cleaner in this volatility. His futures style is more discretionary than his spreads — trend continuation when names are in confluence, reversals at key levels and gamma when they’re not — but he still insists on a specific entry rather than chasing.
Underneath it all is a theme the hosts keep circling back to: patience. Copy trading only works if the person following can stomach a drawdown, because they’ve handed over the keys. The traders who quit after one rough month miss the recovery. The ones who size right and think long term stick around for it.
They close with the week ahead — CPI and a Kevin Warsh testimony that keep most bots off early in the week, PPI midweek, and Friday’s Michigan consumer sentiment report — with the bots sitting out the events by design. Light on trades to start, picking back up by the weekend.
