Inside the head of one of the biggest 0DTE traders I know

Mark Anderson trades one of the largest 0DTE books I know of. Before this, he was doing construction and fixing up rental properties. That's a real career pivot.

I got him on to explain how that happened, and he gave away a lot more than I expected.

Five things I'm still chewing on from the conversation.

One. He runs 15 separate strategies. Only one has a Sharpe above 1. The book works because they never all lose on the same day.

Two. Over half his gross profit disappears into slippage. Bigger than commissions. Bigger than what he pays for the wings. Just the gap between the screen price and the fill he actually gets.

Three. He buys deep wings at an 80 vol when the at-the-money is trading at 15. Deliberately. And the reason has nothing to do with his view on volatility.

Four. I asked whether the 0DTE edge is dead. He took the worst nine months in his dataset, reshuffled them a thousand times, and told me the exact percentile we're sitting in right now.

Five. When I asked about GEX, he was considerably ruder about it than I have ever been.

The full interview is linked below. If you've been selling 0DTE this year and quietly wondering why it stopped working, the honest answer starts around 35 minutes in.

Watch the full interview here

For me, this is what makes the game interesting after twenty years on it. Every trader who's built a real book has a specific edge that took them years to construct. Anderson's edge is 15 strategies that don't correlate on bad days. It's a structural edge built from thousands of hours of P&L observation.

Reading the way a professional 0DTE trader actually thinks about his book is the same read that shapes how I trade my own. The framework I built across 20 years on bank options desks is below.

Watch my free masterclass (exclusive for serious option traders)

The traders who make it long-term in this game have edges that are boring on the surface and non-obvious underneath. Diversification across many small edges. Slippage discipline. Deep-wing hedges built for reasons that don't look like hedges. Data work on your own P&L that no dashboard shows you.

The retail conversation on X will tell you about the strategies. The interview tells you about the machinery underneath the strategies. That's where the actual edge lives.

Fifteen strategies. One good Sharpe. Zero correlated losing days. That's a book.

If you want to skip the masterclass and jump straight into our course, the Options Insight Advantage, this is the link.

Jump straight into our course, the Options Insight Advantage