Option Alpha December 2023 Release

Hello Option Alpha family,

A new major release of Option Alpha officially went live over the weekend. As always, thank you to everyone in the community who took the time to contribute ideas, passion, and creativity to the process. All of the ideas and new improvements came directly from discussions right here in the community. We love your passion for trading!

Also, big thanks go to Jack, Rob, and Matt who work tirelessly to keep pushing this platform forward for everyone

Here's what's new in December's release:

Debit Spreads and Iron Butterfly added to Trade Ideas

Everyone’s been asking for debit spreads to be added to Trade Ideas, and now it’s finally here. Simply toggle between “Credit” or “Debit” based strategies to see even more trade ideas. And let me tell you, the results it’s coming up with, particularly in this low-volatility market, are fascinating!

And of course, we added Debit positions to the Trade Ideas action inside your automations so you can choose between Credit or Debit trades inside your bots when autotrading.

Find Debit Spread Action Options Trade Ideas

Beta weighting for bots and positions

We know this one has been on your x-mas list for a long time, and we’re excited to make your trading wishes come true because now you can beta-weight Trade Ideas, positions, AND bots themselves! Beta-weighing allows you to see, using one “North Star” metric, where your portfolio (or bot) is positioned relative to SPY.

Plus, beta weighing is now available inside both the Bot and Position level decisions, so you can automate the process of managing a beta-weighted portfolio.

To enable beta weighting, just "check" the beta weight box to display it using custom columns on any Bot or Position screens.

New Bot Archiving

Now you can archive bots you don't need but also don’t want to completely delete. Simply archive the bot to free up space for new bots without having to delete them and lose important automations or trade logs.

Plus, when you restore an archived bot, all the automations, stats, positions history, and trade logs will come right back with it.

Tags for Symbols

Similar to how tagging for bots and positions works, we’ve expanded the tagging functionality to include Symbol tagging as well.

This makes it easier to tag symbols themselves for different "states" or criteria like "high rsi" or "uptrend."

Then, reference these symbol tags inside your automations with a decision recipe:

Trade Ideas Presets now show on homepage

If you’ve been using Presets for Trade Ideas, those now show up on the homepage, which makes getting to trade ideas faster and more personalized than before.

Trade Ideas presets on Option Alpha homepage

Filter Open Positions by DTE

Rebound here goes to Reuben for the idea! Now you can use a min-max DTE range for Open Positions which means, when used in conjunction with the new beta-weighting, you can “see my beta weight separately for 1-15 DTE positions vs 16-45 DTE positions...” as Reuben put it to the team.

Warning for bid/ask spread

A new warning shows on the close position screen if there is a wide bid/ask spread (it's currently set at 0.5% of the underlying price), but it also detects zero bid or ask and displays a similar warning.

ETF Ex-Dividends now included in Calendar

We know how important it is to get ex-dividend dates into a calendar for trading for everyone, ourselves included. The problem broadly has been that many ETFs do not officially report ex-dividend dates or dividend amounts. With this new release, we are manually covering (when possible) any ETFs that are missing from official or consolidated data sources and will try to provide you with the best estimated ex-dividend date and amounts that we can dig up. But, we need your help to make sure that we get more eyeballs on these dates in the future, so be sure to help us check, verify, and update any dates or values inside the new calendar.

New setting for “Max Exit Option Attempts”

Limit the number of times a bot will attempt to close a position in a single day with the maximum exit option attempts setting. This setting can be useful to avoid hitting the 390 rule. Learn more about the 390 Professional Orders Rule for options traders.