Keep the profit.
Cut the drawdown.
In a four-year, same-days benchmark, Talon earned comparable profit to the popular MEIC strategy with about a third of the worst drawdown — on less than half the buying power, traded afternoons only.
Talon takes the proven multiple-entry iron condor — the popular SPX 0DTE income trade — and redesigns it to cut the drawdowns, tested against four years of tick-level market data. You trade it from a daily alert, in the afternoon, and you're flat by 4:00 PM Eastern every single day. No overnight risk, ever.
Get Talon with Aeromir Trade Alerts — $149/month Included with Aeromir Trade Alerts.
The multiple-entry iron condor — "MEIC" — is a genuinely good strategy. Our own four-year benchmark shows it profitable, and we'll show you those numbers below, even though it's the strategy we're asking you to trade instead of. MEIC's problem has never been profit. It's the drawdowns you sit through to collect that profit — and the morning-through-afternoon schedule it demands.
Talon keeps MEIC's engine and rebuilds the risk. On the same one thousand-plus trading days, priced with the same fill rules, it produced comparable profit per trade — with roughly a third of the worst drawdown, on less than half the buying power, traded entirely in the afternoon. And every day's values, schedule, and stop math arrive done: you execute, instead of deciding.
So if the profit is comparable, why switch? Keep reading. Here's the evidence.
First, the strategy we started from — and why it earned its popularity
An iron condor collects a credit by selling a put spread below the market and a call spread above it, on SPX options that expire the same day. If the S&P closes between your short strikes, you keep the credit.
The multiple-entry version — MEIC — staggers several small condors through the day instead of placing one big one, each with its own stop on each side. Defined risk on every piece, diversified entry timing, nothing held overnight. Well-known options educators popularized it over the last few years, and it earned the following: in our own four-year benchmark, a standard, commonly-published MEIC configuration netted $45,435 per single-lot. That's not our marketing — that's our own test engine, run against tick-by-tick market data.
We're not here to tell you MEIC doesn't work. We're here to show you what it costs.
The price of that profit
The same benchmark that shows MEIC's profit shows its price tag:
Worst drawdown, per single-lot
40-point version; the 50-point version was $9,157. At the strategy's own average pace, that's a hole that takes months of trading to climb out of.
Worst-case losses run deeper than the worst one on record
History only happened once — so we reshuffle the four years of daily results thousands of times and look at the 95th-worst outcome. It chains bad days into worse runs than the record happened to deliver, though it can only use days that actually occurred. That's the number you'd plan capital around.
It loses more days than it wins
Fine in principle — condor profits come from the sizes, not the frequency — but you feel every one of those days.
Some days, the trade doesn't even exist
The 50-point version couldn't construct a condor at its standard credit target on roughly one day in six across the four years.
If you've traded MEIC live, none of this surprises you. The drawdowns are the part nobody's sales page mentions. This one just did.
Four changes. Four years of data behind each one.
Talon is not a new invention — deliberately. New inventions have no track record. Talon is the proven MEIC engine with four specific changes, each tested against a tick-level archive of SPX option quotes covering every trading day since May 2022.
Afternoons only.
What it buys you: your mornings, and a position that never lives long enough to surprise you overnight.
Standard MEIC starts entering at 10:00 AM and manages positions all session. Talon's entries run from midday into the afternoon: every position lives only its final few hours before 4:00 PM settlement — and your mornings stay yours. If your time belongs to a job or a business, Talon fits around it instead of the other way around.
Tighter wings.
What it buys you: a smaller maximum loss on the rare bad day, and roughly half the capital tied up per contract.
Narrower spreads than the typical 40–50-point MEIC wings. Less buying power consumed per condor — and a structure that found a tradeable condor in virtually every market regime of the last four years, including the stretches where the wide versions couldn't build the trade at all.
Values that change daily. On purpose.
What it buys you: performance figures that describe a policy rather than a lucky setting — and nothing to tune, ever.
Each trading day, Talon's exact credit target and stop levels are drawn from a range of settings we tested across the full four-year archive, and published to subscribers that morning.
Why? Because quoting the one "best" setting a backtest ever produced is exactly what curve-fitting looks like. The performance on this page is the performance of the daily rotation itself — not of a single hand-picked setting. No single value is load-bearing. Tomorrow's values are unknowable in advance — to anyone, including us. How the daily assignment works is proprietary.
The survivor defense (protecting the remaining side).
What it buys you: when half the trade has already gone wrong, the other half stops arguing with the market.
When one side of a standard MEIC condor stops out, the other side keeps its original stop, even though the position's risk has changed. Talon tightens the surviving side's stop automatically, to that day's published level. The members' stop calculator hands you the new number: one tap and it's set.
What it is and isn't: the survivor defense is an early-exit discount, not a shield. It trims losses already underway; it does not prevent the big ones. Every day it failed to help is in the published numbers.
Same days. Same data. Same fill rules. Different strategy.
Most strategy comparisons are apples versus marketing — our backtest against somebody's highlight reel. This one is a controlled experiment. Both strategies ran through the identical test engine: the same 1,022+ trading days from May 2022 through July 2026, the same tick-level SPX option quotes, the same fill rules that charge every stop-out the full bid/ask spread at the moment it fires. The only variable is the strategy.
| Standard MEIC (40-wide) | Standard MEIC (50-wide) | Talon | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net profit | $45,435 | $46,620 | $53,134 |
| Worst drawdown | $9,360 | $9,157 | $3,020 |
| Profit ÷ worst drawdown | 4.9× | 5.1× | 17.6× |
| Modeled drawdown* | $15,039 | $13,665 | $6,139 |
| Profit ÷ modeled drawdown | 3.0 | 3.4 | 8.7 |
| Profit per trade | $9.83 | $13.08 | $10.69 |
| Winning days | 43.6% | 41.0% | 49.2% |
*The 95th-percentile worst drawdown across thousands of reshuffles of the strategy's own daily results. It measures how badly the days we actually had could have been ordered — it is bounded by our own history and cannot price a day worse than any we have seen. Details under "For the skeptics" below. All figures per single-lot and net of transaction costs at $1.20 per contract all-in — commission plus exchange and regulatory fees — charged on every entry leg and on the closing legs of stopped sides; expired legs settle free. Winning days are measured over each strategy's traded days.
Comparable profit. A fraction of the drawdown.
Fixed one contract per tranche throughout — no compounding, no scaling up after good stretches. The shaded band is Talon's worst drawdown. Basis: v131 cpc120 ($1.20/contract).
How long until you know it's working?
The drawdown numbers tell you how deep the holes get. This tells you how long they last. We took every starting day in the four years and asked: if you had begun that day and traded for a month, a quarter, six months, a year — how often would you have finished ahead?
| Start any day, trade for… | Standard MEIC (40-wide) | Standard MEIC (50-wide) | Talon |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 month 1,013 windows | 71.0% profitable worst: −$7,163 | 72.4% profitable worst: −$6,920 | 70.0% profitable worst: −$2,178 |
| 3 months 972 windows | 74.6% profitable worst: −$6,391 | 71.9% profitable worst: −$5,544 | 86.7% profitable worst: −$2,049 |
| 6 months 910 windows | 79.0% profitable worst: −$5,108 | 80.7% profitable worst: −$6,710 | 95.9% profitable worst: −$961 |
| 12 months 785 windows | 92.0% profitable worst: −$3,655 | 91.0% profitable worst: −$4,495 | 100.0% profitable worst: $1,982 |
Every twelve-month stretch in four years made money. The worst one still finished ahead by $1,982. Neither MEIC width can say that — both had losing twelve-month stretches, and the 50-wide had losing years.
One honest note about that table: these windows overlap heavily. 910 six-month windows across four years means each one shares most of its days with its neighbours — so it is 910 views of the same four years, not 910 independent trials. We describe it that way because that is what it is.
And how long do the bad stretches last?
A drawdown isn't just a number — it's the weeks you spend below your own high-water mark wondering whether the strategy still works. Measured peak to full recovery, in calendar days:
- Talon's longest stretch under water: 119 days.
- Standard MEIC 40-wide: 305 days — more than seven months below its prior high.
- Standard MEIC 50-wide: 503 days.
And the count of stretches lasting longer than 90 days across the four years: Talon 4, MEIC 40-wide 3, MEIC 50-wide 2. Read that one against us: Talon spends time under water slightly more often — and climbs out far faster. That is the same trade this whole page describes: more small setbacks instead of fewer devastating ones.
One thing this page won't hide: on the last day of the test window all three strategies were still below a prior high — Talon by $1,241, the MEIC widths by $3,524 and $3,884. Backtests usually end on a high note. This one ends where the data ends.
Read the numbers like a juror, not a fan.
Profit per trade is in the same neighbourhood in all three columns — Talon ahead of the 40-wide, behind the 50-wide, and we won't pretend otherwise. (The 50-wide earns more per trade partly because it trades fewer days: it skips the ones it cannot construct, so its average is taken over a smaller, self-selected set.) Talon has no secret alpha machine, and this page has never claimed one.
The separation is in the risk: roughly two to two-and-a-half times less modeled drawdown, about three times less realized drawdown, on less buying power per trade. Comparable profit, a fraction of the risk — which is exactly the shape a fair benchmark produces. When a comparison shows one strategy magically better at everything, somebody built a strawman.
The number to anchor on is profit ÷ worst drawdown — what you made for the worst pain you sat through. Standard MEIC: about 5×. Talon: about 18×.
Things we do that most backtests don't
1. We charge ourselves the bad fills.
Every stop-out in these numbers pays the full bid/ask spread at the moment of the stop. No friendly midpoint fills, no "assume good execution."
2. Twice now, checking our own work made our numbers worse.
In July 2026 we found corrupted quotes in our vendor's tick data. Fixing them lowered our published net by about 2%. Only three days out of a thousand-plus changed at all, and the worst-case risk figure did not move a cent.
Then in August we re-examined our transaction-cost model and found it charged the broker's commission but not the exchange and regulatory fees SPX carries — roughly half the true cost, and a component most backtests leave out entirely. We re-certified all four years at the real rate, for Talon and for the benchmark, and republished. Net fell another 27%. Every figure on this page is the number after both corrections. Ask yourself when you last saw a trading service revise its results downward — twice, before anyone bought.
3. You get the numbers of what you'll actually trade.
The performance above is the backtest of the daily rotation subscribers actually receive — not the best setting we ever found in research. Most services publish their best cell. We publish our policy.
4. And we're still publishing — every day.
The comparison on this page isn't a snapshot we ran once. Every trading day since launch is scored by this same engine and published the next day, after the data verifies — Talon beside both MEIC widths, on the same tape, with the same fill rules. Wins, losses, and the days the benchmark beats us.
5. And we invited people who trade the benchmark to argue with us.
In August 2026 we walked through Talon on a public round table with two practitioners who trade this family of strategies and don't work for us — including one who trades the benchmark configuration live, every day. The questions were theirs, not ours.
Disclosures — plain and boring on purpose
- Every day means every day. All 33 FOMC announcement days are in the published numbers — no "we skip the scary days" asterisk. The only exclusions are nine early-close half-days, when the market shuts at 1:00 PM and the afternoon schedule cannot execute.
- The rotation has a price, and it's already paid. Rotating daily values gives up a little performance — and carries slightly more worst-case risk — versus the single best fixed setting we ever tested. We pay that price on purpose; it's the anti-curve-fit construction, and it's inside every number on this page.
- Fill-timing sensitivity. Our stop-fill model settles fills over a 5-second window. Tightening it to 2 seconds changes net results by under 1%. Loosening it to 10 seconds lowers them about 6.5%. We publish that sensitivity rather than hoping you don't ask.
- Transaction costs are in every figure on this page. We charge $1.20 per contract all-in — commission plus exchange and regulatory fees, which is what a retail SPX account actually pays — on every entry leg and on the closing legs of stopped sides. Expired legs settle free. If your broker costs more (Interactive Brokers runs about $1.56 all-in on SPX), the numbers shift; we published that sensitivity rather than assume the cheapest case.
- Backtested performance, May 2022 – July 2026, over 1,022 trading days. Backtests are not live results. Figures are per single-lot.
For the skeptics — how the testing actually works
- Tested against a tick-by-tick archive of SPX option quotes — over 417 GB, over 70 billion quotes — covering every eligible trading day since May 2022.
- Entry credits are the prevailing market midpoint at the entry minute — a target you work your order toward, not an execution cost we have charged ourselves. Exits are the opposite: every stop crosses the spread at the quoted bid/ask, the fill a real order gets rather than the fill a spreadsheet hopes for. Entry is the one place these numbers do not charge for execution — a resting four-leg order has time to work, which is why we price it that way, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.
- Drawdown model: daily results are resampled with replacement 20,000 times (a Monte Carlo bootstrap); the published figure is the 95th-percentile worst drawdown across those resamples. It answers given the days this strategy actually had, how badly could they have been ordered? — the paths near that 95th percentile are losing stretches running about 82 sessions. It is bounded by our own history: the worst single day in the record is −$1,365 per single-lot, and no resample can produce a day worse than that. It models sequence risk, not an unseen tail. No drawdown model does the latter, and any that claims to is extrapolating.
- The MEIC benchmark — a commonly published configuration ($1.50 credit per side, 40- or 50-point wings, six entries starting at 10:00 AM, each side stopped at its credit) — ran through the identical engine, identical data-quality checks, and identical fill rules, paired day-by-day against Talon on the same dates.
- The four years split into three consecutive sub-periods, and all three are profitable — roughly +$16,400, +$6,800 and +$29,900. The quiet middle stretch still made money. A strategy that only works in one regime does not do that.
- Assembling the archive took 19 days of continuous downloading before a single backtest could run.
- Every published figure traces to a locked, write-protected data file, stamped with the identifiers of the exact test run that produced it. When the data or the code changes, the numbers are re-verified and re-published — never quietly edited.
Current basis: v131 cpc120 ($1.20/contract) · 2022-05-11 to 2026-07-21 · 4,971 trades · seed 42 · artifact talon_realized_v131_cpc120.csv
What it actually looks like
Values posted
Slack + members' page
First entry
About a minute
Remaining entries
On the day's schedule
Calculator does the math
Including the survivor stop
Flat
Nothing overnight
Before the open, the day's values post to the members' Slack and the Talon page — credit target, stop levels, entry schedule. On a no-trade day (holiday, early close), the alert says so. Silence never means "figure it out."
Through the afternoon, you place a small iron condor at each scheduled time, at the day's credit target — about a minute each in your broker platform. Type your fill into the members' stop calculator and it hands you each side's stop, rounded to the tick. If a side stops out, it hands you the tightened survivor stop. The math is never in your head.
At 4:00 PM, everything settles. You're flat. And the members' journal has saved your fills, contracts, and outcomes as you went — your own results against the day's targets, from any device.
Notice what's missing from that day: decisions. The values arrive done, the schedule is fixed, the calculator does the math. Your job is execution — a few one-minute actions — not a running series of judgment calls. That matters more than it sounds, because decision fatigue is where traders bleed.
Put plainly: you open Slack around midday. The day's numbers are already there. You place an order, and a while later another one. If something stops out, you read the new number off the calculator and set it. At four o'clock it's over — every position cash-settled, nothing carried, nothing to check before bed. Total hands-on time: a few minutes, in the part of the day you chose.
What you need
- A brokerage account approved for SPX option spreads (ThinkorSwim, Tastytrade, IBKR, etc.)
- About $34,190 per contract at full deployment — meaning one contract at each of the day's scheduled entries, all open together in the afternoon. See the sizing box below for where that number comes from, and for what happens if you'd rather trade fewer entries. Contracts are your sizing lever: one contract, five contracts, the arithmetic scales.
- The afternoon. That's the honest time commitment: a few one-minute actions between midday and the close.
and where that number comes from
We size to a rule, not a hunch. The account has to be big enough that the modeled drawdown is 20% of it — a bad run should hurt, not end you — and big enough to be at least twice the buying power the strategy ever commits on its heaviest day ($17,095). You fund whichever is larger. For Talon that's the buying-power side; the drawdown rule alone would let you trade it on less, and we don't recommend that.
These figures assume $1.20 per contract all-in. At meaningfully higher cost rates the modeled drawdown rises, and above a certain rate it is the drawdown rule that binds rather than buying power — so size off your own cost, not ours.
For comparison, the same rule applied to the standard MEIC benchmark asks for $75,198 (40-wide) or $68,327 (50-wide) per contract — and for MEIC it is the drawdown rule that binds, not buying power: its modeled losses are large enough to set the account size by themselves. That's Talon at roughly 45–50% of the capital, for comparable profit. We'll leave you to work out what that does to a return figure; we're not in the business of printing one.
If $34,190 is more than you want to commit. You can trade fewer than the full schedule, and rather than guess at what that costs, we measured all twenty three-entry combinations across the same four years. Which three you pick matters more than the fact that it's three. Across the twenty, the capital rule asks anywhere from about $16,800 to about $39,800 per contract, and profit ÷ modeled drawdown runs from 1.8 to 14.6. The evenly-spaced choices — the ones we'd point you at, selected on spacing before any results were looked at — need roughly $18,000–$21,000 and land at 5.4–7.6, against 8.7 for the full schedule. The worst of the twenty asks for MORE capital than the full six-entry schedule — about $39,800 against $34,190. If you're going to trade three, don't pick them by feel.
One thing the data is emphatic about: the capital does not divide by the number of entries. A third of $34,190 would be about $11,400. The measured answer for the evenly-spaced three is $18,000–$21,000 — roughly 80% higher than the arithmetic suggests, because the modeled drawdown does not shrink in proportion to the trades. Cutting the schedule cuts your profit faster than it cuts what you have to fund. That is the honest trade, and it is why the full schedule is the one we publish. (Fewer-entry figures are derived from the same certified per-trade results; they assume the standard re-peg schedule, which a dedicated replay would refine slightly.)
Fair questions, straight answers
So it's just MEIC?
At the core, yes — deliberately. The foundation being proven is the point. If we'd invented something exotic, you'd be right to ask where the track record is. The product is the four changes and the daily delivery, and the table above is what they're worth.
Why afternoon entries instead of morning?
Honest answer: not because we found a magic hour. We tested entry timing extensively, and no window shows a reliable, out-of-sample edge. So we set the parameter the data doesn't care about to the value that makes your life easier: afternoon entries mean every position lives only a few hours before settlement, and your mornings stay yours. That's our whole philosophy in one decision — when the data is silent, we optimize for you; when the data speaks, we obey it.
Why won't you publish the parameter ranges?
The mechanics of the daily assignment are proprietary — a real part of what you're subscribing to. But the deeper answer: the ranges aren't the edge. The published performance is the performance of the whole rotation. There's no magic number in there to extract, which is precisely the point.
Is this curve-fit?
This question is why the daily rotation exists. A curve-fit strategy is one whose results depend on a single tuned setting. Talon's published results are the results of rotating across a tested range — the anti-curve-fit construction. We gave up performance to build it that way, and said so in the disclosure box above.
Three things we can tell you about that range: every selection we tested from it was profitable — not one loser; the selection we published was committed and fingerprinted before its results were measured, so we could not have shopped for a flattering one; and it lands mid-pack in that range, not at the top. If we were cherry-picking, we picked badly on purpose.
Your chart shows Talon behind for the first two years. Is its edge just recent?
Fair question, and the honest answer runs the other way: Talon didn't start slow — MEIC started fast.
Split the four years into quarters and ask how much of each strategy's total profit was earned in each one. An even strategy earns about 25% per quarter. The standard MEIC benchmark banked roughly 51% of its entire four-year profit in the first year alone, then went sideways — the 50-wide version was outright negative in year two. Talon earned 29% / 7% / 20% / 44% across the four years — the most evenly spread of the three.
So the curve's shape is real, but it is mostly MEIC's early lead flattening out, not Talon accelerating late. If either side's edge is concentrated in one stretch of history, it isn't Talon's. And the risk difference this page is actually built on — the drawdowns, the time spent under water — holds across all four years, not just the recent ones.
What's the win rate?
About 49.2% of days. Read that number carefully, because it is low by design: any day a side gets stopped counts as a loss, even though stopping out is the defense doing exactly its job. A strategy that never stopped out would post a prettier win rate and a far uglier drawdown. And be careful out there generally: in the condor world, a very high win rate usually means the losses, when they come, are catastrophic. Talon's edge is that winning days outweigh losing days at a drawdown you can live with. That's the 18× profit-to-drawdown figure — the number that decides whether you're still trading in year three.
How much capital, and how many contracts?
About $34,190 per contract at full deployment. That figure is the larger of two constraints: enough account that the modeled drawdown ($6,139) is 20% of it, and at least twice the buying power the strategy commits on its heaviest day ($17,095). For Talon the buying-power constraint binds.
Contracts are the sizing lever — the per-contract arithmetic scales, so trade the number of contracts your account supports rather than stretching the structure. Everything on this page is quoted per single contract and net of $1.20-per-contract all-in costs, so you can multiply it yourself.
And if that figure is more than you want to commit: three entries spread across the afternoon run roughly $18,000–$21,000 per contract and keep most of the risk-adjusted advantage — but which three you pick matters, and the sizing box above says by how much.
Will I get the same fills as the published numbers?
Your fills are your fills — no backtest can promise them. What we can say: the published numbers already charge the full spread on every stop, entry credits are targets you match against the live market, and the members' journal tracks your realized fills against the day's target — so you see your own execution quality instead of guessing at it.
How often do the rules change?
The daily values change every day — that's the design. The strategy itself changes only when new research clears the same verification bar as everything on this page. And when published numbers change, we publish the change and the reason — including when the change is downward, as we did in July. What we never do is announce improvements before they're finished and verified. You'll hear about results, not roadmaps.
How big a losing day should I expect?
Losing days are routine — about 51% of days lose. The four-year worst drawdown was $3,020 per single-lot, and the modeled figure to plan capital around is $6,139. Size so that number is boring.
We didn't invent a new strategy. We took a proven one, measured what it really costs, and rebuilt it to cut the drawdowns — then showed you the evidence, including the parts that don't flatter us.
Comparable profit. About a third of the drawdown, on less than half the capital. Your mornings stay yours, nothing is ever held overnight — and there's nothing to figure out.
Aeromir Trade Alerts — $149/month
One subscription. Every alert stream we publish.
- Talon — the afternoon SPX 0DTE multiple-entry condor on this page: daily values, entry schedule, and stop levels.
- Tachyon — the end-of-day SPX iron condor, entered late and settled at the close.
- Phoenix — directional futures signals from our NQ strategy.
- The members' Talon page — the stop calculator that does the survivor math for you, and the trade journal that records your own fills against each day's targets.
- The Excel workbook — live option data, position sizing, and the day's structure in one sheet.
- Slack delivery — every alert, every day, including the days the answer is "no trade."
You keep the rate you subscribe at for as long as your subscription stays active. See current pricing at checkout.
Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for all investors. All performance figures on this page are backtested (hypothetical) results; backtested results have inherent limitations and are not indicative of future results. Nothing on this page is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Trade alerts are educational publications; you are solely responsible for your own trading decisions. Past performance, whether actual or simulated, does not guarantee future results.