I hope you get the answer from the guy himself, but my understanding of below is that it's not based on option chart but on what his model determines to be intra-day over-reaction in the opposite direction of the established trend. Did you read his original thread where he described the system in more details? It was interesting. "I do use a mean-reversion strategy within a defined trend. That gives me 2 trade elements working for me. The system tries to buy an intraday dip in the option price and sell at or near its previous day's closingprice, and still be trading in the direction of the overall short term trend of the SPY."
I think i got the answer from jeffalvinson's previous posts. It is like what you described ie: from a "optimised" model aka a set of fixed numbers.
They trading educators told me it didn't matter. You make money when the market is up, you make money when the market is down and you make money when the market goes sideway. It is very simple: buy low sell high.... See, it is all in price action, supply and demand. But I have been staring at charts for a couple of years and still cannot find supply and demand by looking at charts. Of course I said it in jest, I am just not good at prediction. Maybe you can ask @volente_00 or @S2007S?
I was making an observation about their commercials of successful day traders, "amateur retails all trading from our private jets and yachts, or from the beaches at Monte Carlo after we paid $99 to take those option courses?". If retail traders, are successful as a group as in the commercials does that correlate with a market top, similar short skirts being an indicator of a top.
True. I saw a lot more stock trading informercials on late night TV now than a few years back. Reminded me of 2003-05 where late night TV were flooded with house flipping informercials. Maybe they do indicate a market top.
Isn't stoplimit order a better choice since it allows to set a range of prices where you want your order to be triggered?