LULU reported two weeks back, IV rank elevated, doesn't usually gap much into earnings. Wednesday morning I sat down to run my usual pre earnings check on 23 names. By the time I got to LULU around 9:40 the stock had already drifted a few bucks and the straddle I was eyeing went from $21.60 to $19.20. Still sold it at $19.20, closed next morning for $13.40, about $580 on one contract. Would have been closer to $820 at the earlier fill.
Still lost money on two setups since then, even after I set up a cloud job to run the same screening overnight. The automation doesn't fix bad reads, it just means I stop giving up edge to my own speed.
EDIT: spelling out what I meant since I kept it vague above. cron job on a VPS for a while, then rewrote it as a python script when I needed more tickers. switched to MuleRun a few weeks ago because it keeps running on its own cloud machine and I don't have to restart anything when the box reboots. still just moves the bottleneck from speed to reads.