Futures Paycheck sells premium on S&P 500 E-mini futures options, adjusting to market direction rather than selling blindly.

/ES futures options, always. No other instrument.

This is why the system requires a TastyTrade account — no other brokerage we connect to supports futures options.

When the trend is bullish, it sells short puts on /ES, collecting premium. This is the income engine.

When the trend turns bearish, it stops trading to avoid huge losses from a downtrend or market crash.

Direction comes from a trend indicator built on SPY price data. See The trend indicator and market zones.

The system works out how many contracts your allocation supports, then spreads entries across specific weekdays rather than committing everything on day one.

So a newly deployed system builds its position over days or weeks. See Entry schedule and position sizing.

Sometimes the planned contract count for an entry is more than your brokerage will accept — often because of insufficient buying power or concentration risk limits.

When that happens, Futures Paycheck doesn't give up on the whole entry. It automatically retries with one fewer contract, then one fewer again, until the order is accepted or it's down to a single contract. You'll see a checkpoint in the execution history when size was reduced.

If even one contract is rejected for buying power, that entry is skipped and the reason is recorded. Other broker errors (for example, no valid credit) are not stepped down — those fail once and stop.

Entries are evaluated twice a day — at 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM Eastern — and only on that system's scheduled entry days. Nothing runs when the market is closed.

The afternoon run exists to catch what the morning one couldn't do: an order that didn't fill, a contract that didn't match your targets at 10:00 AM, or capital that freed up during the session. On a day where everything went in at 10:00 AM, the 1:00 PM run finds nothing left to do.

Open positions are re-marked every minute for take profit and stop loss, and their margin requirement is refreshed hourly during market hours — futures margin drifts during a position's life in a way equity options margin doesn't.

Unlike Wheel Paycheck, this system does exit actively. Each short put has a take profit and a stop loss, both configurable. The default is to take profit at 25% of maximum and stop out at 200% of the premium collected.

Take profit is only checked during the regular US session. Stop losses are monitored overnight too, while futures are trading.

The system is built around a target of roughly 2–4% per month in cashflow. That's the design intent, not a promise — actual results depend on market conditions, your settings, and your allocation, and losing months are possible.

/ES is a leveraged product and selling puts on it carries substantial risk, including losses exceeding the premium collected. The default 5 delta sells well out of the money, but a sharp decline can still move against the position quickly. Make sure you understand the strategy and your brokerage's margin requirements before deploying.