---
title: 'Zero DTE Backtest: Morning vs. Afternoon Entry for SPX Iron Condors'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Iy__R2cWrrI'
video_id: 'Iy__R2cWrrI'
date: 2026-07-12
duration_sec: 991
---

# Zero DTE Backtest: Morning vs. Afternoon Entry for SPX Iron Condors

> Source: [Zero DTE Backtest: Morning vs. Afternoon Entry for SPX Iron Condors](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Iy__R2cWrrI)

## Summary

This video backtests two zero DTE (zero days to expiration) SPX iron condor strategies to compare morning entry (10:30 AM) versus afternoon entry (2:30 PM). The results show a dramatic difference, with the afternoon entry producing a much smoother equity curve and better risk-adjusted returns.

### Key Points

- **Backtesting Two Zero DTE Strategies** [00:00] — The video compares morning vs. afternoon entry for zero DTE SPX iron condors using the Zert backtester.
- **Strategy Setup** [00:31] — SPX iron condor with short strikes at 30 delta, $5 wide spreads, no profit taking or stop loss, contracts held to expiration.
- **Morning Entry (10:30 AM) Results** [02:09] — The morning entry strategy was unprofitable with a profit factor of 0.98, win rate ~48%, and a choppy equity curve.
- **Afternoon Entry (2:30 PM) Results** [07:08] — The afternoon entry strategy was profitable with a profit factor of 1.20, higher win rate, and a smooth upward equity curve.
- **Key Differences** [09:50] — Afternoon entry had lower premium (~$25 less) but significantly better risk metrics: max drawdown $2,500 vs $4,600, max risk $1,500 vs $3,100.
- **Dangers of Short-Term Evaluation** [11:10] — Looking at only 6 months of data would have led to choosing the losing strategy. Long-term backtesting (700 trades) is essential.
- **Live Trading Implementation** [13:12] — The presenter converted the afternoon strategy into a live bot, entering trades between 2:20-2:40 PM, with slippage baked in.

### Conclusion

For zero DTE SPX iron condors, entering in the afternoon (2:30 PM) significantly outperforms morning entry (10:30 AM), producing a more consistent equity curve and better risk-adjusted returns despite slightly lower premium.

## Transcript

through and back test two different types of zero DTE strategies just to see if morning versus afternoon works better for a zero DT strategy now before I
begin I'm going to put a link right below this video to these back tests so you that I'm also running one of these as a live template right now I just which is really cool but let's go in and start testing these so first one that
we're going to do here is we're going to run a back test inside of the zert back tester we're going to use SPX here and we're going to do expiration of zero DT that means that the contracts expire the same day that we get into them but in
expiration win Los or Draw no profit taking no stop loss no nothing in this example just purely testing do we get into trades early in the morning or do
we get into trades in the later afternoon so this works good by the way if you're a small Trader and you can do pattern day trading you could also do not going to take profits on those contracts early or get out of the
position early just let expire and settle to cash which is what it does SPX nice wide iron Condor here we're going to set the short strikes at 30 Delta or
closest so we do the short call at 30 Delta the short put at 30 Delta and then to do those $5 apart so in this case we're going to do this one $5 below the
short put leg exactly so we only want to do a $5 wides spread in SPX SPX is a big product so you do $5 wide spread it kind of keeps the margin um or the risk contained here so we're going to do this one oops wrong one we're going to do
this one $5 above the short call leg exactly so again we're going to do a $5 wide iron Condor but we're setting the short strikes at 30 Delta which should premium is kind of not there we're going to leave the capital at $5,000 to start
and only do one contract so essentially every day if there's a contract keep everything the same keep it even and then so entry time here we're going
to do about 10:30 in the morning for this test so we'll do Monday through Fridays we're going to skip fomc days because we don't want to trade those and about this in a previous video which I'll link to below here in the
take a profitable strategy and turn it into a losing strategy just purely on slippage but the important thing here about the time the entry time at n 10:30
a lot of people what they do is they say well you got to get into zero DT trades whereas other people might say you get into them later in the afternoon after
noon when it's closer to the uh to the end of the trading day and then you let it decay there but some people say well the premium might not be there at the versus or sorry 10:30 a.m. eastern time versus sometime in the afternoon okay so
in this case we'll do that when we flip open our position criteria we're not going to do any position criteria here we're not going to do any filtering we options we're not going to do any exit options here the only thing we're going
force slippage here in case you might want to close trades near expiration for some reason but uh but we're not going to do any profit taking no stop loss no touch expert or touch closing so the stock moves and kind of touches one of
do all three years here for this so we'll go back as far as we can for SPX and see what the results are so once we hit this we just hit run we can view the results here the back test will start running once it runs then these results
here and as you can see this one was not a profitable strategy to run if you just straight up ran an SPX iron Condor again at a 30 Delta getting into the position
around 10:30 in the morning so again we did this one testing just purely entering the position at 10:30 in the morning there's lots of variations that we can test but again we're just going to try morning entry versus an afternoon
entry does that get us enough that that we could then start to test more these stats here and you can see I mean even visually the p&l curve you know initially then you kind of got through the first year and you were profitable
but it really was very choppy all the way through and just kind of ultimately maybe at the end of this year maybe it turns back around maybe it's a small winner but really it doesn't look like the metrics look really good so kind of
going through this now you can see obviously we see the total p&l here we see the profit Factor this is a big one that I look at personally because I look at profit factor and I mentioned this before but this is really looking at and
do I get more than a dollar back out of the strategy in this case if you put a dollar in you're getting 98 cents so you're kind of eroding away at a small want to be win rate about 48% that maybe is about what we expect for a 30 delta
type position you can see the max loss was taken 45% of the time Max profit was taken 43% of the time the in between there was partial profits partial losses pricing in here if you look at the average pnl and this is what we had
talked about before is like the average p&l here is about three negative $3 so it doesn't probably feel like if you trade this strategy like if you're in the actual trenches trading the strategy day by day you probably don't feel that
gaining a lot of money it just probably feels like you're eroding away at a strategy kind of slowly and that maybe is the worst for a Trader it's just to kind of erode away at it premium on this strategy was about
$254 and the risk was about $246 so like reward to riskwise you were kind of cover that so you really didn't actually end up doing pretty well here
said you could see time periods where you went through you know long stretches stretches of losing money again it probably wasn't really consistent across
the board um and certainly something you could investigate a little bit more if what we're going to do is we're simply going to add a variation so we're going to take the same exact strategy we're going to add a variation here which
pulls up all of the same information it's Zer DT it's SPX the same iron Condor setup the same Capital the only thing we're going to change here is we're going to change the time and this time we're going to change this to let's
say 2:30 in the afternoon so rather than getting into the strategy 1 hour before the mar 1 hour after the Market opens let's get into it later in the day we'll probably have some lower premium we probably won't collect as much money in
premium but getting into the strategy maybe later in the day kind of reenters the iron Condor around whatever happened during the day and maybe gets us to take setup all the way across the board same slippage everything the only thing we
changed here is we changed the time until or the time that we get into the trade again getting into this trade around 2:30 in the afternoon so we'll results okay so the results are in for that one and the difference is pretty
big so you can see here I mean it's almost a $115,000 difference in the p&l but the curve of these two different strategies is dramatically different I mean you can see this strategy's curve getting into it in the afternoon around
2:30 like up and to the right it's not hockey stick up and to the right which stick but it seems like very consistent across the board again you contrast this
test number a which is just slightly below zero and it seemed like you're treading water to kind of slowly eroding the position so the cool thing here is
if you go through and you look at the variations you can see the differences look at here is again profit Factor that's just one of my personal favorites
but this strategy number a we talked about before you got into a trade you put a dollar into the system you get 98 cents out here you put a dollar in you get a120 back now you're not killing it by any stretch but like that's a good
high profit Factor plus one profit Vector super good and the win rate here was significantly better as well so you probably felt like even trading this you were kind of getting ahead overall because you were making more money than
you were losing and you were definitely winning at a higher clip anyway you did see in this case I think um some lower premiums across the board so yeah so if you look down here at the risk the average risk for trade strategy or
strategy number a which is 1030 is about 246 that's again because that premium was a little bit higher at 250 5 4 here you were collecting less money it was later in the day but that difference is not too bad so the difference between
say the morning the afternoon was probably about $25 or so maybe on average so that meant that you know you kind of forwent an extra $25 of Premium just waiting till the afternoon but it was definitely worth it because if you
don't risk your Capital as long in the trading day you saw a higher win rate across the board so um it was definitely worth doing it's also worth very interesting to note the the Max draw down and the max risk in these two
strategies so the Max draw down is the max Peak to trough draw down that it ever like saw the max risk is the amount of capital from your initial Capital at one point that you ever risk so in this case the max risk on strategy number a
was about $3,000 that means if you started with five at some point you risked up to $3,100 and then Max draw down Peak to trough at some point probably something like this right between these two
$4,600 this one had much better Max risk so at any point you rised about $1,500 and your Max draw on ending point was about $2,500 again it means that
you're not seeing these huge fluctuations in your p&l which is good again you can visually see this just on the chart you don't see the chart even for strategy number B go like this right where at the end of the day it ends up
profitable but it's like look nobody could have ever ever live through those tring experiences right if I see a chart like this even if it's profitable I I the max risk are going to be all over the place right and probably the win
consistent which is why I like this 231 a little bit better interesting to note highlight this for you guys here but I think it's always fascinating when you
work you will inevitably find somebody who will go through a strategy whether couple months maybe even after you know 50 to 60 trades they will determine the
winners and losers and so if you look at this one and we'll just stop here like June 24th 2022 so assuming you started at the beginning of uh 2022 stra trading this strategy and then you got to June of 2022 test number B was in the Hole by
$1,200 now at that point you had about 6 months worth of trading right so you probably had a good trade count not an insanely High trade count but at that cut it off at that point and the problem with doing that is that if you do if you
look at strategies with such a short timeline and such like minimal data it's hard to then extrapolate what's going to happen from a small subset and this is why I like back testing these when you have the ability to do it because then
be exactly like the back test I'm not suggesting it is but like which strategy just broad-based has better metrics when you get to 200 300 500 600 trades and
that's what we want so if you cut off early and you looked at it in June after six months a lot of people would say test number B sucks and test number a is the way to go but it's not really the case it's you know like kind of after
that is don't look at things after two days three days a month two months like you want to do so if you like test number B which is what I did like I knew
about the same even from a couple days ago then what you can do here is you can simply go here to this particular bot so test number B and you can go here and you can create a bot so if I just click that button to create a bot I can name
account and then I can set up my entry time and scan of the day now it's set up by default to trade one time per day or scan one time per day at 230 because
that's exactly how the back test is set up enter a position at 230 usually what I do is I go in here and I give it a little bit of a range around 230 so I'll go in here and I'll say okay let's say 220 to about 240 in the afternoon so not
a wide range I'm not giving it hours and hours of time but I'm not going to do one scan at 230 I maybe want to let it scan for every minute between the next position and what's cool about using trading with the slippage is that the
slippage is already baked into pricing here so you'll just want to confirm this but for opening positions you'll allow 100% of bid ass spread and then 5% of slippage closing trades 100% And 5% of slippage in this case we don't have any
closing trade setup but it just by default includes that if you start to introduce something like exit options or profit taking which you could of course test in here so the fun thing for me is that I actually have been running this
strategy so I converted this strategy over last week when I saw these back at them yourselves but I have been running the strategy live it's in my live trade station account because I like trading it there for SPX because
assignment fees so in this case it's been running it only has a couple trades it's only closed five trades trades here so obviously not huge for uh trade count
but what's cool about this is if you look inside the log here it's doing exactly what I want it's going through the opportunities every day I'd use about 220 to 240 in the afternoon and it's trying to find positions in this
I have no profit taking no stop loss no nothing it went all the way to expiration here and closed for a full wi so that's good it doesn't happen all the time that way so I've had some windows losers already as we start trading here
I know that's the expected outcome because if I look at the win rate here I know it's just over 5050 so but that's with a high trade count that's with almost 700 trades so after a couple trades I know I'm not going to get
supposed to do which is it's entering positions looking for positions to get into selling some premium sometimes it takes partial profits full losses full
profits Etc um but again it's a strategy that I will continue to run moving forward because I like the metrics for it I like the ultimate result of the back test I think it's a good strategy it's an easy one to automate just get
into the position let it expire let the p&l take care of itself over time so I comments again share this video give us a thumbs up or like on YouTube wherever
the hands of other traders who are like you again you can get all the links for let me know and until next time happy trading by