To The Moon

A lot of you have followed this account through some genuinely painful months.

MARA from the mid-teens down to single digits. COIN cut in half. BMNR more than halved. If you've been watching the trade feed, you've seen the unrealised damage in real time. I'm not going to dress it up — running concentrated in two crypto-adjacent names through this drawdown has been brutal, and the wheel premium has been the only thing quietly stitching the wound while the underlying bled.

But here's the thing. The lesson isn't "crypto bad" or "stop selling premium." The lesson is that one or two names should never decide whether the lab eats or starves. That changes now.

What The Portfolio Has Actually Been

For most of the last year the portfolio has been mostly MARA and COIN. That's the honest truth. Some SPY hedges scattered through, some credit spreads here and there, but the centre of gravity was crypto-equity wheel premium.

It worked beautifully when MARA was a $20 stock. It hurt badly when MARA was an $8 stock. Same strategy, completely different outcome — because the strategy was never the real problem. The position sizing was.

Over the last few weeks I've been quietly trimming MARA and rotating that risk into SPY credit spreads. Same premium-selling DNA, completely different concentration profile. SPY doesn't care about a hashprice cycle. SPY doesn't gap 15% on a single corporate event. The math is steadier and that's exactly what this portfolio needs after the year it's had.

Where The Lab Is Going

Here's the bigger shift, and the real reason I'm writing this post.

I'm rebuilding the next version of this operation around three things.

Three core strategies, scaled by regime. PMCCs (poor man's covered calls), front spreads, and the wheel. That's the whole engine. PMCCs do the heavy lifting in steady up-trending markets. Front spreads earn their keep when implied vol is rich. The wheel keeps grinding premium across both. Each one scales up or down depending on the regime — VIX level, trend, drawdown depth — instead of me eyeballing it and second-guessing myself every Monday morning.

Two core counters. MARA and SPY. Everything else gets cleared out as positions roll off naturally. No more half-positions in COIN, no more legacy BMNR tail. Two names. One crypto-equity for the high-vol premium, one broad market for the steady base. Clean book.

An EV calculator that actually decides. I'm building an expected value engine that takes the strategy parameters, the current regime, and the position state, and tells me what the math says to do. Not vibes. Not "feels like a top." Actual probability-weighted expected value — and the trade either clears the bar or it doesn't.

Combine the three strategies, the two counters, and the EV engine, and you get a process that doesn't depend on me being unusually clever on any given week. That's the whole goal.

And Yes — AI Is Doing The Plumbing

Here's the part I know some of you will want to hear and some of you will roll your eyes at.

I'm wiring this whole thing up through the Tiger Brokers API with an AI layer running in the background. Not "AI picks the trades" — the strategies pick the trades, the EV calculator scores them, and the AI handles the execution plumbing. Position sizing, regime detection, concentration limits, order routing. The boring, repetitive stuff that humans do badly when they're tired or emotional or distracted.

I've fed it the rules I actually trade by. The same rules I've been showing on this feed for months. PMCC delta targets, front spread DTE windows, wheel cadence, take-profit thresholds, trend filters. It's not inventing anything — it's enforcing the discipline I sometimes don't.

Will it be perfect? No. Will it stop me from quietly oversizing into a 46,000 share MARA position again? Yes. And that alone is worth the build.

About The Backtests

I've been running backtests on every piece of this — the wheel, the PMCCs, the front spreads, the regime sizing logic. The numbers look encouraging, and I'll share the proper results in a future post once I'm comfortable they've been stress-tested enough.

But I want to be completely honest about what a backtest is and isn't.

A backtest is not a promise. It is not a guarantee that the next year will look like the last ten. Markets adapt, regimes shift, edges decay, and I've seen too many traders fall in love with a pretty equity curve only to get cremated when reality stopped cooperating with the historical data.

What a backtest does give me is peace of mind that the rules I'm trading have logical, mathematical grounding. That when I sell a 0.30 delta put with 28 days to expiry, there's a reason — and that reason has held up across thousands of historical days through bull markets, corrections, and outright crashes. It's not certainty. It's just a long way better than guessing.

That's the whole brand. Stop guessing. Start calculating. The backtest is one of the calculators.

A Genuine Ask

To everyone who's been following along, asking questions in the comments, sending me DMs — thank you. Genuinely. This community is the reason I keep writing these posts instead of just staring at the P&L screen all day.

But please — don't follow this blindly. Don't copy my strikes. Don't mirror my position sizing. What works for a portfolio at this size and this risk tolerance might be completely wrong for yours. Go deeper. Understand why a wheel works in elevated VIX. Why a PMCC is different from a naked long call. Why a front spread is a vol play and not a directional play. The understanding is the part that compounds over a career. The individual trades are just the output of it.

I do my best to reply to everyone, but the messages have started to genuinely outpace my ability to answer them. Sincere apologies if yours has been one of the ones I missed — it's not deliberate. If you want to reach me directly, the fastest channels right now are TikTok and YouTube DMs (Mathematical Money on both), or you can drop a message through my collab partner's site at trueknot.sg — that one also filters through to me.

More posts coming as the new system goes live. I'll show the wiring, walk through the EV calculator logic, and break down the first few trades the AI layer actually executes once it's running on real money.

Stop guessing. Start calculating. Let's go together. 🤙