The Playbook
Here's the entire strategy on one page. No secrets, no black box.
The one-sentence version
Get paid to buy wonderful companies at a discount, hold them for the dividend, and let a bot handle the discipline I don't have.
Step 1 — Only wonderful companies
The bot's universe isn't "stocks." It's a specific pond: dividend growers — businesses that have raised their dividend every year for decades. Think Procter & Gamble (68 years), Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's. Companies that pay you more every single year, through recessions, wars, and pandemics.
Why these? Because a dividend can't be faked. Earnings can be massaged; a cash payment that hits your account every quarter is a hard fact. A company that's raised its dividend for 40 straight years is telling you something no press release can.
That's the base strategy — dividend growth investing. Boring, proven, and the reason plenty of people have retired early. The bot's one tweak is what turbocharges it: instead of just buying, it sells put options to get paid to buy those same companies cheaper.
How we actually find them (our own screen)
Here's the part most "strategies" quietly fake: where does the list even come from?
We don't copy anyone. Every morning the bot runs its own screen across ~350 dividend payers and keeps only the ones that clear four hard filters:
- Raised the dividend 5+ years straight — a real grower, not a fluke.
- Payout under 75% — it's paying you out of profits, not by borrowing.
- A sane price — P/E between 5 and 35. No junk, no bubbles.
- On sale vs its own history — today's yield sits above its 5-year average, the classic tell that a good company got marked down.
That leaves about 120 quality dividend growers, ranked by how cheap they look right now — names with real pedigree, like one that's raised its dividend 43 years straight, another at 32, another at 27.
Then the gut-check: we cross-referenced our list against a real-money portfolio kept by one of the most disciplined dividend-growth investors around. 88% of our picks showed up in his too — independent method, same names. That's how you know the screen isn't hallucinating. The ~12% that didn't overlap? Those are names we surfaced on our own.
Step 2 — Only when they're cheap
A great company at a dumb price is a bad investment. So the bot only acts when a name is undervalued versus its own history — when its dividend yield is higher than its 5-year average, which is the classic tell that the price got marked down.
Buy the wonderful company on sale. Never at full price.
Step 3 — Get paid to wait
Instead of just buying the stock, the bot sells a cash-secured put. Translation: it agrees to buy the stock at a lower price, and gets paid a premium for the promise.
Two things can happen, and both are fine:
- The stock stays up → the bot keeps the premium. Free income.
- The stock dips to my price → I buy a world-class business at a discount, with an even lower cost basis because I already pocketed the premium. Then I sell covered calls against it and get paid again.
This is called "the wheel." You get paid coming and going, on companies you'd be thrilled to own either way.
Step 4 — The bot handles the exits
The thing humans screw up most. The rules are mechanical:
- Dividend gets cut? Sell. The whole thesis was the dividend. If it breaks, we're out — no arguing.
- Stock gets stupidly overvalued? Trim and rotate to something cheaper.
- Otherwise? Hold. The intended holding period is forever.
The guardrails
- No margin. No leverage. Cash-secured means the cash is really there.
- Diversified. Roughly a quarter of the account per name, max. Getting one wrong should be a bad Tuesday, not a catastrophe.
- Everything is backtested first — across multiple decades and market crashes, against an honest benchmark, with a statistical test that throws out anything that only worked by luck.
- Every trade is logged in public. The ledger is the whole point.
That's it. It's not clever. It's just disciplined — which, it turns out, is the hard part.
Taxes: how BeepBoop keeps more of it
Here's the thing nobody backtesting this ever mentions: the taxman decides a huge chunk of your real return. We ran the numbers — same strategy, taxable account. The naive "always sell, get called away" version made 12.7% before tax but only 8.7% after — because every call-away sells the stock and racks up a short-term gain, taxed at your top rate, every single year.
So BeepBoop does three things to keep more:
- Roll, don't get assigned (under a year). When a call is about to be called away and the stock hasn't been held a year yet, he buys it back and sells a new one higher and later. The stock keeps riding toward the >1-year mark, so the eventual gain is long-term (0/15/20%) instead of short-term (up to 37%).
- Only out-of-the-money calls, 30+ days out. There's an actual IRS rule ("qualified covered calls") — deep-in-the-money or super-short calls can wreck your holding period and your dividend tax rate. Staying OTM with a month-plus to expiration keeps everything qualified.
- Hold longer, churn less. Every trade is a taxable event. Fewer, further-out trades = fewer events = less drag. Turns out the lazy version wins after tax.
Those three moves take the after-tax result from 8.7% back up to ~11.4% — +2.7% a year, from the exact same trades. See the receipts.
The real cheat code: run this in a Roth IRA and none of it is taxed — ever. A Roth strips out the tax drag entirely. Just remember: that 12.7% is the gross, optimistic backtest number — the honest real-world expectation is ~10%. A retirement account doesn't grow the number, it just keeps the taxman from taking a cut. Still the biggest free edge on the page.
(None of this is tax advice — talk to a CPA before you move real money.)