What’s New in Option Alpha: February 2024

A new release of the Option Alpha trading platform went live over the weekend. This release includes a more modern look & feel and several new features to upgrade our trading experience to the next level.

Before we get into the goodies, we’d like to share a few thoughts…

Our team here at Option Alpha (5 people) are traders just like you risking our own capital trading options on this platform. Like all traders, we go through winning streaks at times and inevitable losses at times when the market isn’t cooperating with our strategy.

When trades aren’t going our way, we may be tempted to doubt the original strategy, close positions for losses instead of letting the probabilities play out or revert back to beginner mistakes like taking on risky positions out of frustration. It’s those moments, filled with fear and doubt, when poor choices can give back hard-earned profits that take time to accumulate. When we start to feel the heat, we've found the best thing we can do is keep the faith and let our bots do their job - take a walk, hit the gym, get out in nature, etc until we get back to a calm and rational mind. Our research shows the probabilities work over time with a large number of trades so patience is a key element of success.

With that said, we know bot trading still has lots of room to grow and we all wish they could do even more for us at times. Our collective ideas, creativity and knowledge is creating a much improved options trading experience - Options Trading 2.0 - that tackles many of the problems options traders have faced for years and traditional brokers have ignored. Every release contains new experiments to solve challenges and improve results as we strive for higher levels of success regardless of what the market is doing. We can’t guarantee every idea will work out as planned or that every trading session will be a winner, but together we will continue to innovate and come up with new ideas that make incremental improvements that add up over time. Thank you for being a part of this journey with us.

Here’s an overview of what’s new in this release:

⭐️ Personalized watchlists throughout the platform

Create custom watchlists that can be used in Bots, Trade Ideas, Screener and Top Strategies:

Share and collaborate on watchlists in the Community just like bot templates. Want to see how it works? Reuben shared his watchlist of Falcon symbols in the community:

⭐️ Bot Symbols and Watchlists

“Bot symbols” is a new setting for bots that allows us to scan a watchlist or custom list of symbols in a bot’s automations instead of having to use inputs or manage them manually in automations:

Bot Symbols adds the power of automation to the symbol selection process, allowing us to sort, filter and/or exclude symbols right before every scan:

Once the bot’s symbols are set up, we can use the symbols in a loop:

Or anywhere there’s a “Symbols” input:

⭐️ New ‘Conditional’ action in automations

The Conditional action works very similar to a Decision action except instead of branching in separate Yes/No paths, it selectively runs the actions on the “Yes” path if the criteria are met, and then continues down the original path. For example in the image below, the “Reset bot tags” action will only run if it’s 9:45am but the automation will continue down the path to the Bullish entry criteria no matter what time it is.

⭐️ New decision recipes to monitor when positions go in the money

⭐️ New Scanner scheduling options

These new options give us more fine-grained control over when bots scan for new positions.

⭐️ Custom date ranges and multi bot selection in Analyzer

⭐️ Expanded Trade Ideas algorithm

We’ve expanded the Trade Ideas backend to analyze opportunities with legs at additional deltas values. On an average day it analyzes approximately 100 million possible trading opportunities! Here's the full list of delta values it uses now:

.50, .45, .425, .40, .375, .35, .325, .30, .275, .25, .20, .15, .10

⭐️ New bot stats for beta weight and beta exposure

These new properties can be used to maintain a balanced portfolio and/or assess directional exposure. For example, if your bot’s beta-weight is heavily bearish and you prefer to be more neutral, you might choose to open a bullish position to help balance the existing positions.

⭐️ New recipe to calculate bot's total delta and other stats by symol

⭐️ Experimental “Tilt” stat added to Screener

This is an experimental idea that aims to predict when a symbol is more likely to mean revert. It works kinda like IV Rank except instead of ranking IV against the past year, it ranks how far the symbol is above or below its 50, 100 and 200 day against how far it has been in the past 1 year.

For example, in the image below the symbol is 3.2% above its 50 day moving average which ranks in the 15th percentile vs the high of the past year (21.3% above).

How exactly we can use this new tilt metric while trading is still being formulated. If you have any ideas to contribute, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks again for being a part of the Option Alpha family. We look forward to hearing your feedback in the Community.  

Sincerely,

The Option Alpha Team