Here are the results of 100 trades with the 1DTE High Delta Iron Condor options strategy

22 minutes in the trade – and I have made 0,32 % of the total capital risked. That is the average results after I have completed my first 100 trades with the 1DTE High Delta Iron Condor strategy on SPX.

0,32 %. It sounds so little. Can that be an options strategy worth pursuing?

But then think about the short time in the trade. That means that the same capital can be reused at least one more time the same day, either on the same strategy or a different one. Also remember that a trade making 0,32 % daily over the span of 250 trading days in a year turns into an annualized compounding profit of 122 %.

This is the power of 0DTE options trading. If our strategy has a positive expectancy, that is.

Most of my options trading are different day trading strategies. My base strategy is 0DTE Breakeven Iron Condor, which I covered in an extensive article in January 2022 and then later published an update in August 2022.

What does DTE mean?

DTE = Days To Expiration. All options have a date when they expire. A 0DTE option expires today = 0 Days To Expiration. A 1DTE option will expire the next trading day = 1 days from now.

Over the last months, I have tested a different day trading strategy I will call 1 DTE High Delta Iron Condor. In short, it includes selling a high delta Iron Condor with a very wide widths a few minutes after the market opens one day before expiration and closing it as soon as it hits the stop loss or a profit level of 5 – 10 % of the credit received.

The trade primarily profits by the big theta crush shortly after the market opens.

Iron Condor: An options trading strategy where you sell both a call credit spread and a put credit spread at the same time. The trade profits if the underlying stays within a defined range when the options expire.

1DTE High Delta Iron Condor: Profitable so far

I have now completed exactly 100 trades with this strategy. Each of the trades has been 1 contract only. These are the results:

• 78% of the trades have been wins, and correspondingly 22 % have been losses
• The average trade made 0,32 % compared to the buying power committed to the trade
• In total, I have made 2577 dollars on these 100 trades, which makes up for an expectancy of 25,8 dollars per trade
• The shortest trade lasted only four minutes before I hit my profit level, and the longest wait was 91 minutes. The average trade length was 22 minutes.

Inspired by Dave Goodvin

I was inspired to try this strategy by Dave Goodwin in the TastyTrade Options Facebook group. He has had great success with the strategy for a long time – and in the Facebook group, the strategy was actually named after him, being hashtagged #DGSS (Dave Goodwin Synthetic Strangle).

The group members have different ways of implementing the strategy – and my way differs a little bit from most of them. For instance, I take profits earlier than my peers and run a tighter stop loss. That is why I have given it a different name: 1DTE High Delta Iron Condor.

1DTE High Delta Iron Condor

So this is my version of the strategy – and the one I have followed in most of my trades:

• I enter an Iron Condor with expiration the next day within 5 – 10 minutes after the market opens on SPX, the option product for the S&P 500 index.
• The deltas on the shorts are between 22 to 25 and the widths of the spreads are 100. This makes it close to a synthetic strangle. Typically I collect a premium of 1500 – 2000 dollars – and the capital at risk is thus 8000 – 8500.
• I enter a take profit order and a stop loss immediately after the trade is filled
• The profit level is normally set to about 5 – 7 % of the premium collected. In most cases that will be between 80 and 120 dollars per contract.
• The stop loss is set only on the shorts. I set the stop loss at 200 dollars beyond the premium collected plus what I bought the longs for. Example: If I collected 1500 dollars in premium and paid 80 dollars for the longs, the stop loss will be set at 1780 dollars.
• If the profit level hits, the trade is automatically closed and I am fine! However, If the stop loss hits the shorts, I immediately move my attention to the remaining longs. I first close out the long on the side we have been moving away from. Then I look at the last one. Usually, I prefer to close it immediately. But if the market is moving in the right direction, I might choose to hold on for a bit, hoping to gain some of the loss back.
• I will always close the trade on the same day, no matter what. I will NEVER roll or hope it will survive the overnight risk. Also, I never reenter. I do one trade per day with this strategy – and that’s it.

Expectancy: 26 dollars per contract per trade

All my trades so far have been for one contract only. Based on my first 100 trades, the strategy has a positive expectancy of 26 dollars per contract per trade. Or said in other words: I have made 2577 dollars on this strategy during the last few months.

For me it is still too early to say if the strategy will be consistently profitable in the long run. I do notice that the results seems to me significantly more volatile than my bread-and-butter 0DTE Breakeven Iron Condor strategy. It is easy to see a situation in which the market may not favor this strategy for some period.

Thus I willl stick to one contract only until I have logged a much larger number of trades. And it will be a secondary – or supplementary – day trading strategy for me. But I like the strategy, especially that it is so fast. So I will keep trading it most days.

This article is only to describe my own experience with this strategy, and should not be interpreted as financial advice in any way. Remember: Any options strategy carries great risk – and this particular strategy has the potential to blow out your account if you do not use stop losses or manage the risk well.

A couple of final words about the stop loss

I think it is extremely risky to do the 1DTE High Delta Iron Condors without a stop loss. With widths of 100, you are for all practical purposes trading a strangle, and the losses can compound extremely fast if the market makes a sudden and huge move against you.

Let me add two points about how I have chosen to set the stop losses:

First, I set both a stop limit and a stop market order, using the OCO (One Cancels the Other) functionality. The stop market order serves as a last line of defence the stop limit order is not filled for some reason.

Second, I only set the stop on the shorts/strangle. For the first couple of months I set the stop loss on the full Iron Condor. But I experienced quite bad fills on a couple of occasions. I have not had bad fills like that after I changed to only the shorts. But it requires that I pay attention so that I can close the longs manually afterwards. I therefore only put on this trades on days when I have the time to follow it closely.

Would you like to learn more?

I strongly recommend that you join the TastyTrade Options Facebook group and search for #DGSS. And do read the all the comments – very often that is where a lot of the value is. I do love this Facebook group – with lots of members who are eager to share their knowledge with each other.