Trend following is an optional toggle on Wheel Paycheck. It's off by default, and on by default if you deployed the Aggressive Growth version.

With the setting off, the system sells a cash-secured put on any approved symbol that's flat and fits your budget, regardless of what that stock has been doing lately.

With it on, the system adds one more check before selling: is this particular stock trending up? If the answer isn't a clear yes, it skips that symbol on that run and moves to the next one.

It uses the same standard-deviation band indicator that powers the Futures Paycheck System, applied to the individual stock rather than the broad market.

In plain terms: the system looks at where the stock is trading relative to its own longer-term average. Comfortably above that average is bullish. Below it is not, and the put is skipped.

This is worth being clear about, because it surprises people.

The trend filter applies to cash-secured puts only. If you already hold shares from an earlier assignment, the system keeps selling covered calls against them no matter what the trend says.

That's intentional. Once you own the shares, income from covered calls is exactly what you want in a flat or declining stock — refusing to sell calls there would leave the position doing nothing.

The system fails closed. If it can't fetch trend data for a symbol, it skips the put rather than selling blind. It never assumes bullish and it never guesses.

Fewer entries, and longer stretches with nothing happening. This is the intended behavior, not a malfunction. In a broad market pullback it's entirely normal for every symbol in your basket to be filtered out and for the system to sit in cash for weeks.

Some of your allocation will sit uncommitted. If you're also running the Cash Reserve System, that idle cash still earns Treasury yield in the meantime rather than doing nothing.

Your execution history records the reason for every symbol on every run. With this setting on, the two you'll see are:

If you turned this on and activity dropped off sharply, that's almost always the explanation.

Leave it off for steadier deployment and more consistent premium. Your protection in this strategy already comes from only approving quality names you'd be happy to own and from sizing conservatively. Selling puts in a soft market is how you end up owning good companies at a discount, which is the point of the wheel.

Turn it on if you'd rather avoid taking assignment into a stock that's actively falling. You'll collect less premium over a year and your capital will be idle more often, but you'll enter fewer positions right before a decline.

Save whenever you like. It applies at the next entry run and never affects contracts that are already open.