The FD Degen

You buy 0DTE calls and puts the way other people buy lottery tickets. Low win rate. Big winners. Losers go to zero. Math says casino. You'll be back tomorrow.

The 0DTE trade is mathematically a lottery ticket. You know this. Low hit rate, big multiplier on the few winners, full premium gone on losers. Expected value is negative across the full distribution. You know. You have a spreadsheet. You've run the numbers. You buy anyway because the big winner is coming and you want to be in the seat when it does.

What you've built is an entertainment product that occasionally pays out. The dopamine on the winner is so large — so specific and immediate — that it rewires the evaluation. A handful of small losses feel very different from one losing day of the same total size. The brain logs each loss as "just one today" and the rare winner as "I crushed it today." The spreadsheet says otherwise. You have a spreadsheet.

Pre-market. SPY ticking up. Pull up the chain. 0DTE calls just out of the money are cheap. If the index moves another half-percent by the close, the contracts multiply. Buy a stack. Real money on the line.

Open. SPY reverses. Calls bleed. An hour in, they're nearly worthless. Watch them expire. Real money, gone in not very long.

Next morning. SPY ticking up. Pull up the chain.

Pick a number. Total you're willing to lose on 0DTE in a month before stopping for the rest of the month. Write it. Phone notes. Make it real — uncomfortable but not wrecked. $500, $1,000, whatever's yours. Hit it, you're done for the month. No exceptions for "special setups." No exceptions because "this one's clearly different."

While running within that limit: track every trade in a spreadsheet. Date, ticker, strike, expiry, entry, exit, P&L. After fifty trades you have real data, not remembered data. Most people who do this discover the win rate is well below what they thought. If yours is actually decent and the winners actually large, you have a sizing problem, not a trading problem. Different fixes. Can't know which until the spreadsheet tells you.