Four strategies that sell fear by appointment —
and never hold it overnight.

A research program on S&P 500 index options that expire the same day. Two defined-risk decay structures and two event-driven premium sales; every position is opened and closed within one session, so the book is flat every night by construction. All results are net of commissions, exchange and regulatory fees, and half the bid–ask spread, on 28 months of exchange minute data including the 2026 correction.

Core program — defined-risk structures

The engine of the book: two daily appointments that sell the at-the-money straddle wrapped in protective wings. Maximum loss fixed at entry, ~$20k margin per trade, and the smoothest curves in the program. Each name links to its full page: logic, own equity curve, every trade.

Satellite strategies — event-driven diversifiers

Two smaller, episodic strategies that earn from different weather than the core. Their monthly grids show more red — that is their nature, not a defect: Premium Momentum wins a third of its trades at 3:1 size and made its best money in the 2025 and 2026 correction months, exactly when decay strategies rest. They are carried at satellite size for the smoothing they buy, and remain under extended live evaluation.

Combined program

2024: $83,425 · 2025: $214,240 · 2026 (Jan–Sep): $133,969 · Total: $431,634 — one contract per strategy, AFTER paying $9,886 in commissions and fees (itemized on every strategy page).

Capital requirements

The two structure strategies are defined-risk: their margin is their exact maximum loss, fixed at entry. The two event strategies sell single options, margined per trade under both regimes.

The one-line answer: to earn $184,986 a year at 1× scale, you need an account of $252,000 (with portfolio margin) — or $516,000 on a standard account — or $69,000 if you run only the two defined-risk structures.

How often is that much margin actually used? On the portfolio-margin basis the median trading day ties up $82,538, 95% of days stay under $138,787, and the $189,096 worst day occurred 1 time(s) in 544 sessions. On the Reg-T basis: median $172,629, 95th percentile $317,711, peak $387,265 reached 1 time(s). The account is sized to the worst day plus a 25% buffer — most days it sits largely unused, which is exactly the discipline an allocator wants to see.

Worst-day margin is not an estimate: it is the maximum, over all 544 sessions, of the sum of each open position's per-trade margin — defined-risk structures at their exact capped loss, single legs at the TIMS −8%/+6% index stress (portfolio margin) or the published CBOE Reg-T formula. Every per-trade value appears in the blotters.

Scale it to your size

Every figure scales linearly with contract count. Pick the row that matches your capital; the program is identical at every size — same trades, same days, same rules. (SPX 0DTE volume exceeds 1.5 million contracts a day; even the 100× row participates in under 0.1% of it.)

Below 1×: the same program on SPY at 1/10th size — see “Starting small” below.

Why does the return look so high?

Starting small: the SPY route

Every strategy trades identically on SPY options — the S&P 500 ETF at exactly 1/10th SPX size, with the same daily expirations. A $25,000–$50,000 account runs the defined-risk structures at ≈ $2,000 margin each and the singles at ≈ $15,000, earning ≈ 1/10th of the dollar figures above at the same rates of return. The strategies were developed on SPY first and validated on SPX after — the small account is not an afterthought; it is where this research began.

A note on per-trade returns. This site never annualizes the return on a single trade's margin — a position held four hours would produce absurd compounded figures. The only annualized return quoted is the program's, on the full account that carries its worst day.

Results by market

The rules were frozen on SPY data and re-run, unmodified, on two markets never used in development — QQQ and SPX itself. Every strategy stayed profitable on all three. SPX carries the production wings; SPY and QQQ figures are the frozen-rule replications (straddles unwinged, 1/10th contract size on SPY/QQQ).

Radiant Research is a research demonstration by the V6 systematic trading project. All results are backtested on historical exchange data (Jun 2024 – Sep 2026 for SPX), net of modelled commissions, exchange and regulatory fees and half the bid–ask spread. They are not live results, not a solicitation, and not investment advice. Options involve substantial risk of loss.