VIDEO: Office Hours Recap — Members Portal Deep Dive
▎We Went 10 for 10 This Week — Here's Every Tool We Used
Friday, July 31, 2026 · Full replay below
We spent this one differently. We opened the portal and walked through it section by section, because the logs told us something uncomfortable: most members are using a fraction of what’s in there.
If you’ve been logging in, glancing at the open positions and logging out again, this hour is for you.
📺 Watch the Replay
Roughly 67 minutes. Timestamps below if you want to jump around.
What We Covered
First, the week — and the story nobody was telling
The S&P finished up about a percent, the Nasdaq a touch, gold flat. None of that was the story.
The story was a fund blowing up in public. Stocks down thirty, forty, fifty percent in days, and as Tony B put it: “You don’t see stocks down thirty, forty percent in a day just by normal retail selling. There was something amiss there.”
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness was unwinding. And the lesson isn’t complicated:
“Size kills. Size, man. That’s all it ever comes down to is size. The kid was right on AI. The kid was right on the stocks. He just wanted to show he had a big stick. And he leveraged up to the wazoo.”
Years of being right, undone in a week. Not because the thesis was wrong — because the position was too big to survive being early.
We also talked about the underwater close on Wednesday: when the futures keep dropping well past the cash close, after several down days, with volatility already expanding. Tony B’s read at the time was that it’s usually a place to add rather than panic. Thursday’s rally said he was right.
Then the portal, section by section
Substack is home base. Everything lives there — P1, P2 and P3 alerts each have their own tab, the notes section works like a feed, and the search bar is the thing people miss. Looking for a past Office Hours? Search “office hours.” Looking for a specific trade? Search the ticker.
The members portal has four parts, and we built it around a specific idea:
“When we started Grow Your Pile, we didn’t want to be a trade service. We wanted to show people how to construct a holistic portfolio.”
1 · The three portfolios — full transparency, good and bad.
P1 started the year at $1,000,000 and sits at $1,102,000 — better than 10% in seven months. But the number Tony R wanted you to look at wasn’t the return:
“Look at the buying power that I have right now. It’s ten percent. I haven’t seen it creep much above twenty or twenty-five percent in the whole year.”
That’s the whole philosophy in one line. Returns matter, but returns against risk taken matter more.
We walked the open positions so you can see the style plainly — put ladders on /MES and SPY, a gold wheel, the SPX income box, a synthetic covered call on TLT, the Black Swan hedges, and yes, a yen thesis that has cost a few cents so far.
Then the closed trades, which this week were almost entirely green — ten for ten — except one VIX trade. Tony B’s take on that: “If you’re putting a VIX trade on, remember it’s going to go the opposite of a long delta portfolio. You almost have to expect to lose on that if you’re going to go ten for ten on everything else.”
P2 is the smaller, more active book — the QQQ ladder, jade lizards, and two SPX butterflies currently riding for free. The QQQ story is worth its own paragraph: QQQ fell around 9% and the ladder still made money, because every roll went out and down and collected credit rather than paying it.
P3 is a soccer team. Cash and BIL are the goalies. The dollar and TLT are defenders — “although our defender this week was a piece of crap, he didn’t defend at all.” Lithium, copper, palladium and silver are midfielders. Emerging markets, gold and SPY are the attackers. It isn’t built to make you rich; it’s built not to bankrupt you.
2 · All Trades — every trade we’ve ever made.
Open, closed, filterable by portfolio or by symbol. Want to see every QQQ trade in P2 and how each roll went? Two clicks. This section exists because a member named Herb kept asking for it — and he’s given us more good suggestions than anyone.
3 · The tools.
The Put Selector runs our algorithm across SPY, QQQ, GLD and /MES — distance from the money, return on capital, Sharpe ratio, yield — and hands you a starting point rather than an answer.
The Max Yield Selector is brand new, and it strips it down to one question: what’s the annualized yield on every put, at every strike, at every expiration? Shaded so the best of each row jumps out.
“I asked my girlfriend, the computer, to shade out the best yield by strike. Look at this beautiful pattern — it’s a mathematical pattern, a step-down ladder.”
One thing to be clear about: those yields are on a cash-secured basis. On Reg-T margin they’re several times higher; on portfolio margin, higher still.
The Long Vega tool answers the question nobody wants to ask: how much am I willing to waste on protection? Our rule is 3% of theta. If your book makes $300 a day, that’s $9,000 a month, and 3% is $270 — about nine dollars a day to spend on insurance. The tool lays out four ways to spend it.
The BSH Factory builds a tail hedge funded by premium you sell, so the protection largely pays for itself.
4 · The Portfolio Optimizer — and we ran two live.
Two members posted their metrics in the chat and we plugged them straight in on air. One came back healthy across the board with delta running “a little bit caliente” — and the suggested fix was simply rolling August into September to shed some delta. The other came back hot nearly everywhere, and led to the most useful exchange of the hour:
“You must know your short units. You can have no delta, but with a portfolio margin account you could have fifty on one side and twenty-five on the other and quickly find yourself in harm’s way.”
If you’re short both calls and puts, the rule of thumb we gave: ten short puts against fifteen short calls is roughly five naked units, not twenty-five.
And the education section — the Options Selling Premium Masterclass (the closest thing we have to a written trading plan), the Black Swan Hedge Bible, and the Wealth Masterclass.
The Line That Sums Up Why We Built It
“It’s like having us next to you. ‘I want to sell a put — which is the put that Tony and Tony would probably like?’ At least in the Put Selector, you can see. Then you go as aggressive or as conservative as you want.”
And the reason underneath that:
“Trading is sometimes very lonely.”
That’s it. Not signals. A second opinion, available at 2am, that doesn’t get tired of you.
For Members — What To Do Monday
The session was open to everyone. This part isn’t.
Three things worth doing before the open:
1. Run your own numbers through the Optimizer. It takes two minutes: portfolio value, delta, theta, extrinsic, buying power and short units. If you don’t know your short unit count, that’s the finding — go count it before you do anything else.
2. Check the Max Yield grid against a position you already have on. Not to trade it. To see whether the strike you picked was actually the best-paying one at that distance, and by how much you missed.
3. Open All Trades and filter by one symbol you’re trading. Follow a chain start to finish — the QQQ rolls in P2 are the best worked example we have of what “out and down” actually looks like across eight days and six fills.
Coming up: Tony R rolls the SPY position from August to September on Monday, using the Put Selector live so you can follow along at whatever size you’re running — one contract, ten, or one SPX.
And a standing offer: yearly members get a complimentary one-to-one. Monthly members can book a call through Substack any time. With 1,400 members we can’t sit down with everyone, but the door is open and we mean it.
Questions between sessions: TonyB@squaredtcapital.com, or Tonyr@squaredtcapital.comil.
Grow Your Pile is educational. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. We show you our trades and our reasoning so you can learn the framework. Your account, your size, your risk. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Selling puts carries undefined downside risk. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and the results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.
— Tony Battista & Tony Rihan