Five years of ETH history, three ways to trade it.
Same market, same options pricing, same costs. The only difference is discipline: the gated wheel underwrites only when insurance is expensive and the strike is historically cheap.
Monsoon (gated wheel)
$138k
- APY
- 6.2%
- Max drawdown
- 31.5%
Sold puts in 18 of 66 cycles. Skipping the rest is the strategy.
Buy & hold ETH
$124k
- APY
- 4.1%
- Max drawdown
- 79.3%
The benchmark. Full exposure, full drawdown.
Naive wheel
$65k
- APY
- -7.6%
- Max drawdown
- 71.1%
Collected $159k premium and still lost money. Premium is not income.
Equity curves
2022 is the whole argument
ETH fell 65% that year. Buy-and-hold ended it at $61k. The naive wheel, selling premium every single week, ended at $72k. The gated wheel ended 2022 at $114k, up 9%, because it spent the top in cash and only started underwriting after the crash, at strikes near historic lows.
Method: daily Coinbase ETH-USD closes, Deribit DVOL as implied vol, Black-Scholes pricing with a 15% market-maker spread haircut, 30-day cycles, physical settlement. Results are robust across delta 0.15 to 0.25, both gate thresholds, and a 25% haircut. A backtest is evidence, not a guarantee.
| Year end | Monsoon | Buy & hold | Naive wheel |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | $105k | $188k | $142k |
| 2022 | $114k | $61k | $72k |
| 2023 | $131k | $119k | $107k |
| 2024 | $145k | $169k | $134k |
| 2025 | $131k | $147k | $79k |
| 2026 | $138k | $124k | $65k |