Entry timing analysis
Each strategy broken down by minutes-after-open, normalised across the DST transition. This is where the most surprising findings live.
The DST window — recap
From 2026-03-08 to 2026-03-28, US clocks moved forward but UK clocks did not. During that 3-week window, a "14:00 UK" entry corresponded to 10:00 ET = +30 minutes after market open. In the rest of the year, "15:00 UK" was the same +30m slot.
All buckets on this page are expressed as minutes after market open (9:30 ET), not as wall-clock times. Full methodology here.
Buckets that exist in the data
The dataset contains entries at the following minute offsets from market open:
- +15m — used by 20 Delta and 30 Delta IC variants only.
- +30m — primary slot for Iron Fly V1, V2, and Dynamic 0DTE.
- +60m — primary slot for Iron Fly V3 and V4.
Profitable buckets, ranked
Strategy + bucket combinations sorted by total P/L. Only combinations with at least 5 trades shown.
| Strategy | Bucket | Trades | Win % | Total P/L | Avg P/L | Best | Worst |
|---|
Per-strategy bucket breakdown
Key timing observations
Iron Fly family clusters at exactly two slots
V1 and V2 enter at +30m; V3 and V4 enter at +60m. None of the four strategies has more than one meaningful entry bucket. Naive analysis splits these into apparent "early" and "late" slots based on UK clock time, but those splits are an artefact of the DST window.
+15m is the only profitable Delta IC slot
Both 20 Delta and 30 Delta strategies have their best (or only positive) results at +15m after open. The +30m and +60m slots in 30 Delta lose money on average; 20 Delta's +60m slot is the worst single bucket in the entire dataset at −$52.83.
+30m is where most of the book's profit lives
Combining Iron Fly V1, V2 and Dynamic 0DTE — all three at +30m — accounts for approximately +$268 of the +$252 total book profit. Almost everything else is either offsetting losses or noise.
The book has a narrow timing footprint
All trades in the dataset cluster into just three slots after the open: +15m, +30m, and +60m. There are no genuinely late-day entries. Any analysis of "best entry time" therefore reduces to picking among these three buckets per strategy.