Episode 230 of The Automation Station — the Friday show on The Pulse from the Tradier Hub — spends its time on two things the show does well: rethinking a strategy in public, and using a real losing trade to teach why discipline matters. Dillon and Ben walk through a ground-up redesign of BenBot and a side-by-side of two condors that took opposite outcomes on the same day.
BenBot gets the biggest rethink. It started life as a daily covered-call bot on IWM — buy 100 shares, sell a call against them, adjust through the day — and it made about 14% over a year. The problem was that it was capital-intensive (you needed $26,000-plus) and could hand you $700 to $800 loss days. So Ben cut it down to something leaner: mostly buying calls or puts, occasionally selling a spread or iron condor, driven by a signal set he’s published as a free TradingView indicator called BenBot Alerts. The new philosophy is modest and honest — BenBot is “the bot that pays for your PeakBot subscription.” It needs only about $50 to $100 per unit (roughly $250 to $1,000 to max out), and the key change is discretion: instead of firing on every signal, Ben hand-picks the high-conviction ones, using the volume profile to avoid trading into a wall of resistance. He shows the morning’s example — a put bought at 1.20 and sold at 1.45 for a clean 25-cent gain — and makes the case that a couple of those a month is the whole point.
The King family provides the day’s lesson in defined risk. King AI Turbo had won 15 straight, banking about $3,324, before finally losing $635 — it flew close to the sun at the 25 delta, collected $365 of premium, and watched price blow clean through the spread. King AI, meanwhile, played it conservative at the 10 delta for about $170 of premium and squeaked out a win by roughly $7 (a 6477 close against a 6470 strike). It’s a tidy illustration of the tradeoff: more premium means less room, and on the wrong day that room is exactly what you need. The hosts talk through their playbook — when King AI loses, they flip Turbo on for the faster recovery; when Turbo loses, they tend to stick with King AI, since Turbo has strung together the occasional $2,000 drawdown while King AI rarely loses back-to-back.
There’s a fun, transparent moment too: Dillon resets his live Tradier account to $5,000 each time it grows, and this week he withdrew $3,061 in profit built since early December — roughly $760 a month trading a single unit of King AI or Turbo (never both) with a little Shorebo mixed in. “I feel like a prop trader,” he jokes, “except I can actually pull my cash out.”
They round out with trader trivia (the P/E ratio compares price to earnings), a quick history of fractional shares, a Shorebo check-in framed around a revert-to-the-mean on/off approach, Ben’s TQQQ wheel that may get assigned, and a quiet week ahead with a Powell speech Monday and non-farm payrolls Friday keeping King Condor on the sidelines. (Note: this video is a re-post of a late-March session.)
