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Who I am

Hello visitor. My name is Alex and I am the founder of Systematic Options Trading. Allow me to introduce myself and say a few words about my background.

I studied banking and finance and started my career there, but moved early on to the consumer-goods industry. I spent more than 23 years in sales and commercial roles at two companies, the first of them one of the largest in the world. About 15 years in, my career was going well when, out of the blue, I was fired. Only a few months earlier I had been told my performance was exceeding expectations.

With a severance payment and my savings, I suddenly had a six-figure sum to invest. That is when I first started thinking seriously about becoming a full-time trader.

Soon afterwards I was offered a job at a mid-sized local company in the same industry. It looked like a step down, and I came close to turning it down to trade options full-time; I had found a few online services and had already started trading. Fortunately, I reconsidered. Taking the job was the sensible decision: I grew personally and financially, was promoted, and ended up running a growing sales department. On the side I kept trading, mostly options. For the first two years, selling premium, I was roughly break-even.

And then came 2020

I don’t remember the exact amount, but I remember the date. On 16 March 2020 I lost over $40,000 in a single trade. In the middle of the COVID panic, with premiums and strike distances blown wide open, I thought it was a good idea to sell something like a 10-delta put with one day to expiry. And since it looked like such a great opportunity, I sized it generously. How likely was it that SPX would fall another 150 or 200 points after the drop it had just had?

Very likely, as it turned out: it took about an hour. Suddenly I was looking at an unrealised loss in the tens of thousands. I closed the trade and drove home numb, in shock and despair. I thought I knew everything about options. I had read plenty about the catastrophic tail risk of selling premium. And I had still walked straight into the trap every novice falls into: greed.

Worse was to come. Over the next two to three years I lost even more, trying to win back that one loss. By the end of 2022 I had tried everything (mostly options, some stock day-trading) and my losses had grown to more than $120,000.

Building the system

By then I had read and researched enough to know that without a system and proper risk management I would never succeed. It took me another three years of research and backtesting, in evenings and weekends alongside a full-time job, to build a 0DTE trading system that is consistently profitable over longer periods.

I have been trading it every day since May 2026, and so far it delivers as expected.

Then history repeated itself. In September 2026, after eight years of strong results, I was let go from my second job as well. One day they tell you that you are no longer needed, and there is nothing you can do about it. My wife had lost a similar corporate job the year before. Add two children in private school, rising rent and the ever-growing cost of living; you know the drill, it’s much the same wherever you live.

Fortunately, over the last couple of years I recovered my earlier losses and more, mainly by investing my savings long-term in ETFs. But at this stage of my life I can’t live off savings.

The consistent profitability of my 0DTE trading has arrived at exactly the right moment, making the dream of financial independence for me look closer than ever.

I’m sharing all this because I believe it is important to understand where I come from, and there are a lot of people out there with similar experiences. Today I treat trading as my business and my main source of income.

Why this service exists

Looking back, I can see how clueless I was when I started. I spent endless hours online looking for guidance and a systematic way to trade profitably. I tried many subscription services and found that most of them were valuable mainly to their owners. They sell “education” and appear to offer a system, but can’t show a proper track record. Even when they do, and you try to copy the trades, they tell you it doesn’t work that way: you need to learn “the system” and trade it on your own. Been there, done that.

That is what led me to start this service. You get an alert for every trade the system takes, exactly how each position is built, and the full four-year backtest with every drawdown shown. I don’t offer this for free: it took years of work, alongside a full-time job, to build. But looking back, I would gladly have paid a subscription to anyone who could show me a system with a real chance of winning, and let me follow it. What about you?

You can try it for two months, free. If you’re interested, read on.

What this service is not

This service does things differently, so let me start with what it is not, and who it is not for.

It is not a quick or easy way to get rich. Following the system takes time, effort, real options experience and capital. I go through each one below. If you completely lack any of them, you will not be able to run it. And if you don’t know what options are, I’m sorry to say it, but this is not the place to start. Build the knowledge and gather some experience first; you’re welcome back any time.

It is not investment advice. Every alert is impersonal and identical for every subscriber. Nothing here takes your personal circumstances into account, and you alone decide whether, and at what size, to place any trade in your own account. All performance figures on this site are hypothetical and backtested, and past results, backtested or real, are no guarantee of future returns. The full disclosures are on the Disclosures page.

It is not managed money or auto-trading. I never have access to your account, and nothing trades on your behalf. You receive the alert; you place the trade.

What the service is, and what it requires

The service sends trading alerts for a portfolio of four SPX 0DTE premium-selling strategies, all of them defined-risk credit spreads. Every decision comes from quantitatively backtested rules, so there is no manual or discretionary trading at any point. The strategies react to market regimes (trending, ranging, stretched) identified by strictly defined, proprietary criteria. These regimes are often not visible on a simple intraday chart.

The backtest

The strategies were backtested over essentially the whole period in which SPX has had a 0DTE expiry every weekday: 2 May 2022 to 30 April 2026, 944 trading sessions and 16,637 trades. For the Portfolio of all four strategies combined at Full size (hypothetical / backtested):

• Total profit of $1,293,565, trading one contract per leg and never compounding

• An average profit of $1,370 per trading day and $26,949 per month

• 72% of days and 39 of 48 months profitable

• Profit factor of 1.57 per trade and 2.02 per day

• A return of 40.8% a year on the peak margin the Portfolio required

• Maximum drawdown of −$55,572 (12.5% of that margin); worst single day −$47,307

The backtest was deliberately built to be hard on itself: real one-minute quote data for the whole SPX option chain, every leg paying the full bid-ask spread (sold at the bid, bought at the ask), $1.20 commission per leg, and settlement on the SPX official close. The full methodology is in The system.

Curve fitting, and how I have tried to guard against it

Every strategy built from a backtest is exposed to curve fitting. Search a fixed stretch of history long enough and you will find a rule that worked there (easy to do in hindsight) and that often fails anywhere else, including the future.

Two checks stand against that. First, the same rules were tested out-of-sample on the two years before May 2022, on the days a 0DTE expiry existed (three days a week at the time). Second, and more important, I have traded exactly these strategies since 1 May 2026, and that record is the most important test. The results for this period are confirming the ones of the backtest. This means that the rules developed with the data up to April 2026 keep delivering results afterwards. That is an edge.

What you need to run it

A warning first: it is a lot. Even with a qualified system this isn’t easy, and however good the backtest, there is no guarantee it keeps working forever. Sound familiar? It’s the challenge every business owner faces. To earn money you have to invest time, effort and capital, and take risk. There is no free lunch.

1. Options knowledge and experience. The system trades SPX 0DTE credit spreads, and a lot of them. Throughout the session it checks market conditions every 15 minutes and opens positions, or doesn’t. Some days bring only one or two entries, busy days more than thirty; in the backtest the Portfolio averaged about 18 entries per session. You need to understand exactly what these positions are, because they carry significant risk, and you need experience executing real options trades, quickly, during the session.

2. Time. This depends on how you execute the trades. Normally it means sitting at your trading station for the whole session (9:30 to 16:00 ET), waiting for alerts and acting on them as often as every 15 minutes. That is a full-time job. Or you do it like me and automate the trades with a trading bot. Then the only thing left to do is supervise the bot. Think of it like Full Self-Driving with supervision: it still takes time, but you can do other things at the same time. Building a trading bot is easier than you think. I have no coding background, and if I managed it, so can you. But it will take a significant amount of time at the beginning to develop it and test it. As it will take significant time to go through all the materials here in the site and Discord member server. This is a complex set of strategies with loads of executional details to set up at the beginning. I strongly recommend to read everything very carefully again and again if you want to follow the system.

3. Capital, and a margin account to match. Selling credit spreads ties up margin. At Full size, each Reversal spread has a maximum loss of $5,000 minus the credit received, and each spread in the other three strategies $10,000 minus the credit. The system trades many of them every day. In the backtest the full Portfolio needed about $124,000 of margin on an average day and up to $443,000 on the busiest, and an account has to be sized for the busiest day, not the average one. I trade the full Portfolio myself, with an account above that size (but under $1 million). I have also tested and qualified two smaller versions that use narrower spreads: Portfolio Half peaks at about $219,000 and Portfolio Quarter at about $108,000. You might also choose to run a single strategy on its own. At Quarter width, the minimum you will need is about $20,000 for Reversal and at least $40,000 for each of the other three.

4. Patience, and a strong stomach. Despite a 40% annual return on peak margin over four years, the gains come much harder than a table suggests. In the backtest (Portfolio Full), the average winning day made $3,739 and the average losing day lost $4,862. The profit comes from 72% of days being winners, which means you lose on more than one day in four. And averages hide the extremes: the worst day lost $47,307. It happened once in four years, but 42 days (roughly one in 22) lost more than $10,000. On a four-year equity curve they are only small dents, but you have to be ready for them when they come.

   Be just as prepared for the swings within a day. In the backtest, 98.5% of days were in the red at some point, typically for about an hour and a half. A gain of several thousand dollars can turn into a loss of $5,000 or more within minutes. Some days are calm and the P&L climbs steadily; I love those days. Others are chaos. If you panic and close positions outside the rules, you will fail. Trust the system, or you are gambling. The day ends at 16:00 ET, and that is the only moment you can be sure of the result.

How to start

I can’t stress this last point about patience enough. You may have the capital, the time and the options knowledge. But if you can’t sit through the volatility, you won’t collect the premium. No free lunch, remember? Sitting through that discomfort is exactly what the edge pays for.

Speaking of trust: if I were you, I wouldn’t trust this blindly. You don’t know me. For all you know, this could be an elaborate scheme to get you to subscribe and collect your hard-earned money. And how certain can you be at this stage if it really works?

That is why I strongly recommend using the free two-month trial to paper-trade the system from the alerts. You will see live results you can compare with the backtest, and in the members’ Discord you can see the results since 1 May 2026, day by day, for each strategy. Above all, you’ll get a feel for how results swing within a day. Nothing prepares you for that better than watching it unfold live.

After the trial, months three to five cost $100 a month, which gives you more time to gather data before deciding whether to trade with real money. After that, the subscription is $500 a month, or $5,000 a year. A card is needed to start the trial to avoid misuse. Nothing is charged during it, and you can cancel at any time.

In the end, it comes down to what a tested, rules-based system with a documented record is worth to you. In my darker days I would gladly have paid more than $500 a month for something that works, as long as I could see it working with my own eyes. What do you think?

If I still have your interest, the next step is The system.