How Tammy Chambless Trades 0DTE Iron Condors in 2026: What Changed in Her MEIC
Tammy Chambless backtests her MEIC every month. Here is what changed in 2026 — earlier entries, triple the slippage — and why she still holds to expiration.
Tammy Chambless is a full-time options trader best known for the Multiple Entry Iron Condor (MEIC), a 0DTE SPX strategy that spreads several iron condor entries across the trading day. She named the strategy and has refined how she trades it, though she is quick to say she did not invent multiple entries.
Nine months after their first conversation, Dan Sheridan sat down with Tammy again to ask what had changed. The short answer: her best entry times moved, her slippage roughly tripled, and her win rate dipped in a choppier, headline-driven market. Her core rules did not change.
How she got here
Tammy started trading because of her father, then moved into options around the mid-2000s after taking Optionetics courses. She traded part-time, mostly longer-dated options, while working.
She went full-time after retiring in 2017 and started trading 0DTE around 2018–2019. Before that, she traded 30-day and then 7-day options without stops. That taught her a lesson she still repeats: without stops, “you will make a bunch of money,” but a few trades take it all back. On 0DTE, she calls stops mandatory.
She backtests every month, and it moved her entries to the morning
At the end of every month, Tammy backtests the previous six months and uses the results to choose her entry times for the next month. She even tested the look-back period itself (two weeks, three months, six months, one year). In her testing, six months to one year predicted the following month’s best times most reliably.
For about three years, the backtests kept pointing to the same answer: afternoon entries beat morning entries. Starting around January 2026, that flipped.
| 2025 interview | June 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Where entries cluster | Early afternoon, after watching the market settle | Five of six entries before noon ET |
| First entry | Early afternoon | Within minutes of the open |
| Win rate | About 54% | About 52–53% |
| Average slippage | About 5 cents | About 13–15 cents |
She resisted the early entries for a couple of months, delaying them until the market had traded for a while. Once the afternoon times backtested negative, she followed the data.
Why might early entries work now? Her observation: at the open, implied volatility is high, so strikes at her target credit sit far out of the money. As the day goes on, the same credit pulls strikes closer to the money. In her view, early entries simply get more room.
Why six entries, not twelve
Some MEIC traders, like Rob Helmick, spread entries across many more times. Tammy trades her six best. When she backtests more entry times, the win rate falls, because the extra times are not optimal ones. She would rather put more contracts on six strong times than spread them across ten or twelve.
Credit, width, and buying power
Tammy targets about $1.50 of credit per side, usually landing between $1.25 and $1.75. Width varies by account, and she treats the width as the real worst case: if every trade went to max loss, the full spread width is what she would lose.
- 25 wide in an account running METF, a multiple-entry trend-following strategy that uses EMAs as triggers
- 50 wide in a larger account, using about 30% of buying power
- 50 to 80 wide in another larger account
- 100 wide, 2 contracts, about $2.30–$2.50 credit in a small manual account, newly testing live after it backtested well
The trade-off: for the same credit, a narrower spread puts the short strike closer to the money, which raises the odds of a stop-out. Wider spreads sit further out but carry more total risk.
Even so, in Tammy’s experience a farther-out short doesn’t protect as much as it feels like it should. On a low-VIX morning, her 100-wide and 50-wide entries had shorts around 12 to 16 delta, and all of them stopped out within about a minute of each other. Her advice for the nerves of entering that close: “Just hold your nose and do it.”
Her daily rule: she sizes so that a day where every trade stops out costs no more than about 2% of the account. That is a sizing target, not a hard cap; with market-order stops and the higher slippage she now sees, a bad day can run past it.
Stops, slippage, and why she never takes profits early
Tammy uses stops on every trade and takes everything else to expiration. When she backtests exiting winners early on a consistent basis, results get worse. Closing early shrinks the average win while the average loss stays the same, so the win rate must rise to compensate, and it does not rise enough. If she holds to expiration, she knows her probabilities.
Slippage is the bigger change. In one account she could count on about 5 cents per trade and built that into her stop. Now it averages 13 to 15 cents across her accounts, which she attributes to sudden headline-driven candles. She is adjusting her stops to account for it.
On stop orders, she has tried limit-order bots and algos, but in her experience the few seconds of delay produce worse fills overall. She sticks with market orders. When a fill looks unreasonable, she checks the option’s own one-minute chart in her broker platform and calls the broker; some will adjust the price.
Does VIX matter for 0DTE iron condors?
Not in her testing. Many 0DTE traders say they prefer a higher VIX for the extra room, but Tammy finds no correlation between VIX level and MEIC performance. She has also tested filters based on the newer short-dated VIX measures, including the one-day VIX, and they did not help.
In her experience, what hurts MEIC is chop: days when SPX runs up 100 points, falls 100 points, and closes near where it opened. As she sees it, a 30-day volatility index won’t capture that. At Dan’s suggestion, she plans to look at whether average true range (ATR) can flag those conditions.
She also notes that METF and MEIC tend to fail on the same kind of day. Running both can smooth the equity curve, since one often wins when the other loses, but choppy markets hurt both. She has not yet found a strategy that does well in chop.
The PDT rule change and small accounts
With the pattern day trader rule changing, traders with around $10,000 can trade 0DTE more freely. Tammy’s thoughts for traders at that size:
- She expects 25-wide spreads would be needed to keep buying power within a $10,000 account.
- In her view, the usual rule of using at most 50% of buying power won’t work at that size, which calls for care.
- She thinks two or three entries fit better than five or six. The original MEIC design assumed about $30,000 to support six entries, enough diversification for the probabilities to work out.
- She encourages backtesting credit, width, and entry times together. Her entry times only work with her credit and width; copying the times alone does not copy the results.
The biggest mistake 0DTE traders make
Asked what holds traders back most, Tammy did not name VIX or headlines. She named discretion: trying to guess where the market goes next and overriding the plan.
Her example: a trader’s calls stop out early, so they stop entering calls for the rest of the day. Then the market turns down, takes out their puts, and there are no calls left to offset the loss. With multiple entries, the day is not over until the last entry plays out.
Her answer is automation, as a way to carry out her rules without second-guessing them. She has steadily moved money from her manual account to automated accounts, so most of her capital keeps trading even while she travels. Dan agreed: after more than 20 years of mentoring, the single change he would make to most traders’ results is getting them automated. Automation itself isn’t an edge, though; it carries out a strategy’s rules, and Tammy’s entry times come from her monthly backtests.
Key takeaways
- Tammy backtests on a schedule. She re-tests the last six months every month, and her best entry times have changed.
- Fewer, better entry times beat more entries in her testing.
- She holds to expiration and always uses stops. Closing winners early hurt her backtests.
- Slippage roughly tripled for her in 2026, and she is adjusting her stops to account for it.
- VIX level didn’t help as a MEIC filter in her testing; choppy days are her bigger concern.
- She automates to remove discretion.
Test your own MEIC
Tammy’s results depend on her exact credit, width, and entry times, which is why she tells traders to run their own numbers. In Option Omega you can backtest a multiple-entry iron condor with your own credit target, width, stops, and slippage, run an optimization across entry times, and automate the result.
Watch the full conversation: SPX 0DTE Iron Condors: Tammy Chambless (The Queen of MEIC).
This post summarizes a conversation from June 2026 and is educational only. Backtest results are hypothetical and do not guarantee future performance. Options trading involves substantial risk.
