Episode 232 of The Automation Station — the Friday show on The Pulse from the Tradier Hub — is a homecoming of sorts. After a few weeks off the air, Dillon and Ben explain where they’ve been: heads-down building the business and on the road for Trader Fest, the in-person event hosted by Tradier and CBOE at PGA National in Palm Beach. They come back with a clear focus for the show going forward — putting the growing marketplace of trading partners in the spotlight alongside their own bots.
The marketplace tour is the centerpiece, and it shows how varied the lineup has become. Alpha Crunching runs directional trades off proprietary signals, selling a $5-wide SPX spread and letting it expire, with a $500 minimum and 1DTE and 7DTE versions on the way. Beast Mode Trading places end-of-day iron condors on SPX and XSP, but with a human deciding the strikes rather than an AI — essentially King AI with a person at the wheel. Lage Trading (Logan, whom they met at Trader Fest) brings zero-DTE SPX and XSP spreads plus occasional quick directional single-leg trades. And Reversal Trader King adds something rare for them — an equities strategy that dollar-cost-averages into intraday positions and exits for a half to one percent gain, with a two-year track record. With more than 35 pro traders signed and 50-plus strategies coming, the guys also sketch out a new format: bring each new partner onto the show at launch, with an exclusive coupon that disappears twenty minutes later.
The standout bot moment is a lesson in rules-based risk control. King AI and King AI Turbo entered a condor Tuesday for Wednesday expiration, and the model flagged something unusual — the vote for the new Fed chair, an event that happens roughly once every four years and simply wasn’t in the backtest data. Rather than guess, the bot treated it as an unknown level of risk, shut down, and took a partial profit. It turned out the trade squeaked out a win by about fifty cents after spending much of the afternoon in the money, and the hosts note the early exit likely saved a lot of subscribers from panic-selling a scary-looking position into a loss.
On the numbers, King AI Turbo is up nearly $4,000 on $2,000 — close to 200% cash-on-cash — having clawed back about $1,200 of a $2,500 drawdown they attribute to a stretch of war-driven volatility the ML model had never seen in training. King AI is up about $2,740 since September with a smaller drawdown, exactly the more conservative profile you’d expect. They also check in on the wheel strategy (Ben’s TQQQ position added about $120 a contract on the week) and walk through Logan’s first live trade — a call credit spread sold at 7500 that booked $484 on a $10,000 account.
They wrap with a quiet week ahead — the 1DTE bots sitting out the weekend after an overnight drop, FOMC minutes midweek that the PeakBot condors now trade through, and a note that the Michigan sentiment report has lost some of its punch — plus the usual real-world asides about the war and painful gas prices.
