It wasn’t front-page news.
It showed up as a blip on Bloomberg and a line on the CNBC ticker, and most traders scrolled right past it.
Licia and I didn’t.
Between us we’ve spent close to six decades trading options, both of us coming up as market makers on the floor, so when the CBOE quietly launched a new kind of short-dated option on individual stocks, we saw what the headlines missed.
It opened the door to a trade that simply wasn’t possible before.
The idea behind it was straightforward.
Most of the market’s biggest moves don’t happen while you’re watching them during the day; they happen overnight, in the hours between the closing bell and the next morning’s open.
You go to bed, and by the time you reach for your phone the move has already happened without you.
What Licia and I wanted to know was whether you could get in front of those overnight moves on purpose, buying a cheap option in the afternoon and selling it into the move at the open.
So we set out to find the answer the only way two traders trust, which is by risking our own money on it.
Over the last 90 days, the two of us and more than 200 trading partners put real capital on the line trade after trade, testing the approach, taking our share of misses, adjusting, and testing again.
Somewhere in those three months we found the thing that made it all work, and we ended up calling it the Tilt.
The Tilt is a score we built to do one job: tell us which way a stock is likely to move by the next morning.
When it points up we buy calls, when it points down we buy puts, and that’s the whole position.
There are no spreads and nothing complicated about it, just a direction and an inexpensive option.
What still gets me is that the Tilt doesn’t care what the chart looks like.
We had a trade on IGV where the price had been climbing all afternoon, the kind of slow grind higher that would have most people reaching for calls.
The Tilt read it the other way and told us to buy puts, so that’s what we did. The next morning IGV dropped like an elevator, and a 63-cent option turned into a 155% gain overnight.
One trade like that could be chance, which is why the number that matters is the longer one: across the full 90 days, the Tilt has been right 83% of the time, with winners like 181% on GLD, 121% on a 19-cent Nokia option, and a pair of triple-digit moves on NVIDIA, adding up to a track record with an 83% win rate and $14,819 in real profit.
I’m not going to lay out everything inside the Tilt here, but last night I sat down with Licia and walked through it the way I’d walk a friend through it, going trade by trade, the wins and the misses both, showing exactly how the Tilt called each one.
We recorded the whole session, and the replay is up right now.
It’s locked, so to watch it you’ll need the password: 1dte
The replay comes down soon, so watch it before it does.
Once you’ve seen what the Tilt caught while the rest of the market was asleep, I don’t think you’ll look at the morning open quite the same way again.
Your Only Option,
Mark Sebastian