Strike vs Patrol: Two Engines, One Scoring Core, Opposite Earnings Rules

One difference that produces two products

Both engines do the same job: score cash-secured put contracts, apply a safety floor, publish a small ranked set each morning. They share a scoring core and they share ShieldIQ, so a score from one means the same thing as a score from the other.

The difference is a single condition, and it is inverted between them.

Patrol excludes contracts whose expiration spans an earnings announcement. Strike requires the contract to expire after an announcement.

Everything else that distinguishes them follows from that one rule. It is the reason there are two products rather than one screen with a checkbox.

Why the earnings condition splits cleanly in two

An earnings announcement is a scheduled event that reprices a stock in a single move, outside market hours, by an amount nobody can predict precisely. Implied volatility rises into it and collapses immediately afterwards.

For a put seller, that produces two genuinely different trades that happen to use the same instrument.

Selling through an announcement means being paid an elevated premium to accept a concentrated, dated, binary risk. The premium is higher because the risk is real, not because the market has mispriced anything. Whether it is worth taking depends on how the underlying has actually moved through prior announcements, which is a different question from how far the strike sits from the market.

Selling away from announcements means accepting ordinary market risk for ordinary premium. No scheduled catalyst sits inside the contract's life. The distribution of outcomes is wider in the tails than a model suggests, but it is not dominated by one dated event.

Mixing these in one screen produces a ranked list where the top contracts are almost always the earnings ones, because they pay more. A seller running a steady-state book would find their output quietly taken over by event trades they did not ask for. Separating them is what stops that happening.

What each one is for

Patrol runs daily across the broader market and is the steady-state engine. No contract it publishes carries a scheduled earnings event inside its life. Its calibration is regime-aware, so the scoring adjusts to prevailing conditions rather than applying one fixed standard across every environment. If you are running a continuing book and want the same shape of output every morning, this is the one that produces it.

Strike works relative to the announcement date, requiring the contract to expire after the event and within a bounded period afterwards. It is event-driven by construction, so its output is lumpy — a heavy earnings week produces more candidates than a quiet one. If you deliberately want to be paid for earnings risk on terms measured against how a stock has actually reacted before, this is the engine that scores it.

Both hold to expiry. Both record above the strike as a win and below it as a loss. Neither assumes a profit-target close.

The safety floor is the same, and the inputs differ

ShieldIQ measures each strike against how the underlying has actually behaved rather than against the distance a pricing model implies. The status labels are identical across both engines — Fortified, Secure, Tight, Exposed — and on both, a contract that fails the floor does not publish however rich its premium.

What differs is what "actually behaved" is measured against. For Strike it is observed earnings reactions, because the risk being priced is an announcement. For Patrol it is multi-day return distributions, because the risk being priced is ordinary market movement. Same principle, appropriate reference data.

The thresholds differ too. Patrol's buffer bands are tighter than Strike's, recalibrated to the narrower moves a non-earnings contract faces. A buffer that reads as comfortable on an earnings contract would be doing less work on a steady-state one, so the labels are matched to each engine's own distribution rather than shared blindly.

There is also a ceiling on both. A buffer that is unusually wide does not publish either, because measurement showed that band carried a materially higher loss rate than the overall baseline. A contract can be too far out as well as too close, and both ends are gates rather than preferences.

The records

Both are published in full, contract by contract, on the performance page.

• Patrol: 8,375 settled contracts, 89.03% finishing out of the money.
• Strike: 1,377 settled contracts, 91.36% finishing out of the money.

Two things are worth saying about those numbers rather than leaving them to speak for themselves.

They are close to each other, and that is the point of a shared scoring core — the engines are not competing, they are covering different conditions to a common standard. Patrol's larger count reflects that it runs every day across the broader market while Strike only has candidates when companies are reporting.

And a win rate on its own is close to uninformative. Push a strike far enough out and almost any approach wins most of the time; what decides whether a strategy makes money is the ratio between the typical win and the typical loss. Why a 90% win rate can still lose money works through the arithmetic. Both figures above are held to expiry with no early closures counted as wins, which is the only version of the number that says anything about entry quality.

Which output suits which approach

Take Patrol if you want a consistent daily set with no scheduled event risk inside it, and you would rather your book's outcomes be driven by ordinary market movement than by dated announcements.

Take Strike if you specifically want to be paid for earnings risk, you are comfortable with lumpy output that follows the reporting calendar, and you want the strike measured against how that underlying has actually reacted to prior announcements.

Take both if you want the steady-state book as the base and the event trades as a deliberate, separately-sized addition. This is the common case, and the separation is what makes it manageable — you always know which kind of risk a contract carries, because you know which engine published it.

One thing neither does: manage a portfolio. Both score contracts independently and have no view of what you already hold. Position size and concentration remain yours, and on a bad day they matter more than the score does — sector concentration shows why.

Both engines are included in the single subscription; there is no tier that unlocks one or the other.

Worth reading next

What is a cash-secured put covers the instrument both engines score. IV crush after earnings covers the volatility mechanics that make the Strike side behave differently. Gap risk covers the overnight move that is the central risk in an earnings contract.