How do you select strikes for the After-Close PDT Shield trades? Is the Expected Daily Range (EDR) the primary driver, or do you place greater weight on RSAi skew analysis?

At VixShield, we select strikes for our After-Close PDT Shield trades through a disciplined integration of the Expected Daily Range (EDR) and RSAi (Rapid Skew AI). The process begins at 3:10 PM CST each market day, immediately after SPX settlement, ensuring we operate outside PDT day-trade restrictions while capturing fresh closing volatility data. EDR serves as the foundational layer, providing our proprietary forecast of the day's likely price excursion by blending short-term implied volatility from VIX9D with 20-day historical volatility, scaled by a regime-adjusted multiplier between 0.8 and 2.0. For instance, with SPX recently closing at 7173.91 and VIX at 18.14, an EDR reading around 1.25 percent might project a roughly 90-point daily range, guiding our initial wing placement roughly 1.0 to 1.5 times that expected move for the Conservative tier. This creates defined-risk Iron Condors with approximately 90 percent historical win rates on the Conservative side. RSAi then acts as the real-time refinement engine, analyzing the current options skew surface, last four hours of VIX momentum, and exact positioning relative to VWAP. It adjusts strikes in $5 increments, alternating call and put wings until the net credit precisely matches our tier targets: typically $0.65 for Conservative, $1.10 for Moderate, and $1.55 for Aggressive. In the current VIX environment near 18.14, which sits in the 15-20 range, we limit ourselves to Conservative and Moderate tiers only, blocking Aggressive entries per our VIX Risk Scaling rules. ALVH, our Adaptive Layered VIX Hedge, runs in parallel across all tiers with its 4/4/2 contract ratio on short, medium, and long-dated VIX calls, cutting drawdowns by 35-40 percent during spikes at an annual cost of just 1-2 percent of account value. This combination embodies our Set and Forget methodology: no stop losses, full reliance on Theta Time Shift for any recovery. Position sizing remains capped at 10 percent of account balance per trade, preserving capital across the approximately 18 winning days out of 20 that Conservative traders have historically enjoyed. All trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. For deeper examples and live signal walkthroughs, explore our SPX Mastery resources and consider joining the VixShield community for daily 3:10 PM CST alerts and PickMyTrade auto-execution on the Conservative tier.