📅 Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 5:00 PM ET
We’ve been trading structures Liz Dierking and Jenny Andrews designed for years, and in all that time we’d never once had the chance to ask either of them a question about it. That got fixed tonight.
Portfolio 2 closed an AMD jade lizard on August 25. Nine days later Portfolio 1 closed a GLD zebra for $590. Tonight one of the two people who designed both of those shapes sat down with us for a little over an hour.
And the honest headline isn’t a strategy at all. She’s building something new, she told us what it is, and then she asked us to be part of it.
What she’s building
Level Up with Liz and Jenny. She said they’re targeting October, it’ll be a free YouTube channel, and the whole point of it is to put a room back together.
“All we’re really trying to do is bring back the community of higher level traders that we had.”
She was specific about the level. This isn’t a beginner show. She and Jenny Andrews will be trading their own accounts on the air, in their own real portfolios, and she named building an IRA from a clean slate and trading in portfolio margin as two of the things you’ll watch them do. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s close to how we run this.
The part that stuck with us was why they’re doing it for nothing:
“Jenny had said we’d do this for free, for life, because we loved our viewers. We loved trading.”
Then she put both of us on the spot, live, and asked if we’d come on as guests now and then. There was no thinking about it. Of course we will.
Her site is lizjny.com. There’s an email sign-up on it, and she told everyone to go put their address in. She also handed each of us a “certified badass option trader” card on the air, which we’re choosing to believe is binding.
She got some unsolicited business advice back, which is what happens when you come on this show. The sign-up sits at the bottom of her page, most people never scroll, so put a link to it at the top. She’s getting her guy to do it.
The jade lizard, and the problem it was built to fix
Battista asked her for two or three go-to trades. She didn’t hesitate on the first one.
“I thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly lean on jade lizards.”
That’s her margin-account workhorse. Naked put, out-of-the-money call spread above it, collect more than the call spread is wide. Put it on, take it off around half, do it again. She said people still walk up to her at events to tell her it’s their bread and butter trade.
What we’d never heard before is why it exists. Start with a short put. It gets tested. Your brain, being a reasonable brain, tells you to sell a call against it to bring in some money. Then the market bottoms and rips back up, and the short call is the thing that kills you. The jade lizard was the answer to that one question: how do you keep selling premium without taking the loss from the short call?
How she sizes it. She wants roughly seventy percent of the credit from the put and thirty percent from the call spread. On a ten-wide call spread that’s about three from the spread and seven from the put, which adds to the width, and she wants a shade over the width. Then she pushes the call spread as far out as she can and still get her three. Her longer-dated ones go out around forty-five days.
What it does and doesn’t protect. She’s had this argument enough times to be blunt about it. There is real risk to the downside. There isn’t risk to the upside, if the credit clears the width and you built it properly. She once did a seminar in Germany where the room wouldn’t let it go, and she was still saying the same thing at the end:
“There is risk in the trade, but not to the upside, if set up properly.”
Say it wrong and it sounds like a free lunch. It isn’t one. It’s a short put with a financed kicker on top.
Managing it. Two different fixes for two different problems, and she separates them cleanly.
If the call spread is the thing under pressure, she rolls the call spread down and takes in more. She can do that without adding buying power, because the naked put is already covering it, and she’s already banked enough credit that anything extra is gravy.
If the short put is the thing under pressure, the call spread is probably worthless anyway. So she rolls the put out in time and down, exactly the way she’d defend any naked put, then writes a fresh call spread against it. Her words for the result: it’s the credits that roll.
At twenty-one days she stops nursing anything. It goes back out to forty-five.
Why this shape and not an iron condor. Puts carry the higher implied volatility. By not buying that last downside wing, she never buys the most expensive option on the board. On the call side it inverts, so the one she sells is richer than the one she buys. The trade leans on skew in both directions at once, and she said it’s one of the only structures they could find that does.
The zebra, and what forty thousand dollars of stock actually costs
Trade two, and this is the one for an IRA or any account that doesn’t have margin. She’s about to get a clean-slate IRA from a former employer, so she’s thinking about it out loud.
A zebra is a zero extrinsic back ratio. Buy two, sell one, and you own a hundred deltas to the upside with no premium bleeding out of it. She set one up in GLD on the screen against the cost of a hundred shares and guessed before it priced that it would come in around a tenth of the capital. It did.
“You’re going to control one hundred shares of stock, one for one to the upside in your IRA for a fraction of the capital.”
Then she sells near-term calls against it to chip away at the cost basis. We do the same thing, just closer in, because the shorter you go the less of the valley between the strikes you have to walk through. And that valley is the whole risk. Long two units means a move down against you costs two-for-one until the longs catch up, which is why she won’t let one drift. Her rule is that you do something while your longs are still near the money. If it’s already blown past them, you waited too long.
The story she told about one of these is a good one and she was the first to say it was luck. Her brother got a phone call from a neighbor about a new disease and a reason to own Moderna. She put two long-dated zebras on for him rather than buy the shares, and then the Moderna news landed and he called her asking what on earth had happened.
There’s a variation we’ve been running that she hadn’t used, and she took the note. The zebra leaves you long an extra call you never paid for. If the market starts to come apart, you can sell a call against it, closer in and even in the money, to cut the position’s delta roughly in half on the way down. Keep crashing and you take profit on that one and sell another lower. You may still lose. You lose a fraction of what you’d have lost. She’d been using her extra call on a covered-call rhythm instead, rolling seven-day calls, which is a perfectly good use of it, just a different one.
The morning trade
A member asked for her favorite SPX eye-opener, and she answered it honestly, including the part where she said it’s a trade she probably shouldn’t do.
She trades it early, before the open, in the extended session. Before she does anything she pulls up the most-active options list on the Cboe site and looks at where the first prints of the day are sitting, because they cluster on round numbers.
“It’s almost like a gravitational pull towards where they’ve started.”
Then she sells a downside put ratio at that round number, two short against one long a few points above. Once that’s filled she immediately works an order to buy a wing below it and turn the whole thing into a butterfly, because the tape has been going both ways and she’d rather lock the range than be right about direction. Defined risk, decent probability, and she’s had it fully butterflied off before the market even opened.
“Nothing makes me happier than when you pin an SPX butterfly, even if it’s only for five hundred bucks.”
Rihan called Battista the godfather of the broken wing butterfly, which Battista received about as gracefully as you’d expect. Liz gave him the street cred anyway, and one better. Do it on both sides and it’s a bat wing.
Acquiring the thing you actually want
The last piece tied the whole hour together, and it’s the closest thing to a philosophy she gave us.
She wants to own assets. So instead of buying them, she sells short-dated puts in them, week after week, until she gets assigned. Then she’s long the thing she wanted at a better basis, and the next day she rolls it into a zebra to free the capital back up. If the put gets tested before assignment, she switches it to a zebra right there. Same destination either way.
“My name is Liz and I’m an addict, so I keep an eye on them.”
Those weekly puts have been the change in her year. She said she’s made more on the short-dated ones than on the longer-dated ladder that’s supposed to be the bread and butter, and we’re seeing exactly the same thing in our own book. One of us told her where the rhythm came from in the first place:
“You always talk about trading small, trading often, which we stole from you guys.”
There’s one thing she does that we don’t, and it’s worth knowing if you hold crypto. Buying the coins outright ties up cash dollar for dollar even inside a margin account. Running the same exposure through the spot ETFs and putting a zebra on instead gets her a lot more notional for the same money. She named the funds she likes and one she doesn’t, and we’re leaving the tickers out of this email until we’ve checked the spelling on every one of them, because getting a ticker wrong in print is how you lose somebody money.
What she took from us
Worth recording, because it went both ways all night.
The habit she said she’s picked up is comparing a position’s current delta against the delta it had the day she put it on, and then bringing it back. She’d always looked at the entry number. She’d never looked at it again. That’s most of what portfolio management is.
She also said she didn’t know what a diagonal was until recently, which coming from a floor trader is either very funny or very reassuring, depending on where you are in your own learning.
Members, here’s the replay
[VIDEO: replay link, for GYP Members]
About seventy minutes.
