Mike Ziegler
I go by Ziggy. I am an ironworker. I have traded my own account for several years, around a shift, which is the entire reason this platform exists and looks the way it does.
I am not a licensed financial advisor. I hold no securities licenses and no professional credentials of any kind. Nothing on this site is investment advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. If you want advice, the person to ask is one who is licensed and paid to give it, and who is accountable to you when they do.
Almost every finance site you read is written by someone whose job is writing finance sites. This one is written by someone whose job is building things out of steel. Take that for exactly what it is worth in both directions.
What Clock Out Capital is
Clock Out Capital, LLC is a software platform for retail traders who hold full-time jobs. You configure a bot, connect a broker you already use, and it runs while you are on the clock. Your broker holds your money throughout. We never take custody of it.
It is software, not a fund, not an advisory service, and not a signal group. There is nobody here deciding what you should own.
The two problems that turned into software
I ran the wheel by hand for a while. Selling a cash-secured put, waiting to see if I got assigned, then selling calls against the shares, then doing it again. None of that is complicated. All of it has to happen during market hours, which is when I am on a job site, and a lot of it has to happen at a particular moment rather than whenever I next get to look at a phone.
Dollar-cost averaging had the same shape of problem from the opposite direction. The idea is simple enough: buy more when the price drops further. Actually being there for the drop is the hard part, and a dip that resolves inside an afternoon is a dip you slept through if you were up on steel.
Neither of those is a knowledge problem. I knew what I wanted to do in both cases. It was an attendance problem, and that is a thing software is genuinely good at.
What the strategies actually do
There are twelve of them now, and every one executes a rule that you set. None of them predicts anything. A bot here does not decide what is a good buy; it does the thing you already decided to do, at the moment you said to do it, whether or not you are near a screen.
- Wheel. Sells cash-secured puts, sells covered calls against the shares if you get assigned, and repeats. You choose the underlying, the target deltas, the expiry window and the point at which it closes for premium captured. It needs Level 2 options approval at your broker, which is your broker’s decision and not ours.
- Smart DCA. Buys more as the price falls further from a reference you set, and sells when your profit target is hit. You set the reference, the drop levels, the multipliers and the target. This is the one that fixed the dip I kept missing.
- Smart DCA-Out. The mirror of it, for going the other way: distributing a position gradually, selling more as price rallies above your reference.
- Grid. Divides a price range you define into rungs and works mechanically across them, accumulating toward the bottom and scaling out toward the top. It suits a range-bound asset and it does not suit a trend, which is written on the strategy rather than hidden.
- The boring ones. A portfolio rebalancer that acts when a holding drifts past a threshold you set, and a tax-loss harvester. No opinions, no predictions, just the maintenance nobody remembers to do.
- The rest cover credit spreads, mean reversion, and stock, crypto and perpetuals trading, on the same principle: your rule, executed on time.
What automation changed for me was attendance, and only attendance. It does not make a strategy sound, it will not rescue a rule that was wrong to begin with, and a bot following a bad plan follows it precisely. The risk is entirely still yours, which is why every strategy here shows you its mechanics in plain language before you run it, and why you can paper trade any of them first.
You can read what each one does on the main site, and the covered call calculator works through the arithmetic of a single wheel leg if you want to see the shape of the trade before touching any of it.
Why the writing here looks like it does
Every lesson on this site opens with a real, dated measurement taken from our own scan of roughly seventeen hundred stocks, then explains the idea behind it. That is a deliberate choice and it costs us traffic.
The alternative was the ordinary one: write “what is RSI” and compete for the biggest search terms. Those pages are decided by how old and well-linked a domain is, and there are sites with twenty years of head start. What none of them can publish is what our own data actually said on a particular Thursday.
So that is what we publish, with the date and the sample size attached, and the assumptions named. When we have got a number wrong we say so on the page. There is a lesson that exists only because we published two figures that disagreed and had to work out why.
Clocky
Some of what you read here is drafted by Clocky, which is Clock Out Capital’s AI analyst rather than a person. Clocky has no biography, no credentials and no trading record, because inventing those for a piece of software would be a lie told to make writing look more authoritative than it is.
Clocky’s notes are labelled as what they are on its page, and anything of lasting use gets rewritten as a proper lesson with the measurement attached.
What is not claimed anywhere on this site
- No track record, win rate, or profit and loss figures.
- No price targets, forecasts, or calls of any kind.
- No credentials, licenses, or professional standing.
- No promise that any strategy, bot, or backtest will repeat. Past behaviour of a market is not a commitment about its future.
The risk disclosure sets out the rest in full, and it is worth reading before you connect a broker to anything, ours included.
Getting hold of me
The contact page reaches a real person, which at present is me. If something here is wrong, that is the fastest way to get it corrected, and corrections get made on the page rather than quietly.
Otherwise, the lessons and the calculators are the useful part of the site, and both are free to read and use.