What’s New in Option Alpha: August 2026

As part of the last release, we shared a vision we have in which multiple symbols, strategies and DTEs can all be combined to create a long-term trading plan with lower drawdowns and higher profit potential. Last night we released an update that moves us one step closer towards that vision with new features for combining and analyzing strategies to build a profitable automated portfolio.  

Lessons Learned

In my personal story as a trader, shared on YouTube, I've gone down a humbling journey from trading binary events (Earnings), to manually picking trades (Trade Ideas), to adding a couple automated strategies (e.g. WiFly & ORB), to trading 1 strategy based on intraday data (GEX), and finally landing where I am today with multiple uncorrelated strategies working together, all automated.

Here are a few important lessons learned about consistency along the way:

• It's impossible to have consistent results with an inconsistent plan.
• I need to eliminate myself because my daily mood and decision making state is inconsistent.
• I need to maintain a long-term view since drawdowns frequently last longer than 30 days.
• Looking at profitability from a short-term perspective may lead me to take bigger risks to make up for short-term losses which can accelerate drawdowns.  

Trading with a Plan

Testing how a set of strategies perform together and offset each other in different market conditions over time is an important part of creating a resilient long-term trading plan. For example, this plan combines 5 strategies for higher overall profit while reducing drawdown lower than Strategy A alone:

By combining backtesting and automation, we can create automated portfolios of uncorrelated strategies that produce consistent long-term results with shorter and lower drawdowns while also reducing cognitive load and screen time.

Our Commitment

We are investing $50K of our own corporate funds into a new automated options portfolio that we’re calling “OA Portfolio”. It combines 6 strategies in 3 symbols with 4 DTEs. We envision this new portfolio will be a learning experience at first and we will share what we learn (and our results) with you every step of the way.

Here's the list of new features in this release:

Strategy "Insights" in the backtester

Backtest Insights provide actionable information about your strategy and results. Spot potential issues and concerns without having to dig through the data. Here are a couple examples:

If you have any suggestions for additional insights, please share them in the community.

Combine up to 7 backtests into a single portfolio (and bot)

In order to enable more advanced portfolio based trading, we've increased the number of backtests you can combine to 7.

Day of week breakdown when viewing a backtest

No need to rerun backtests to analyze results for specific days:

Name backtests when generating a bot from combined backtests

Creates scanners and position tags based on the backtest names you define.

Generating backtest to bot remembers previous selected options

When generating a bot from a backtest (or portfolio) it now remembers the previous settings you've used for name, schedule and trade pricing for each backtest. This is especially useful when modifying a backtest and then using it to update an existing bot.

Several new features to make it easier to work with saved backtests

Quickly select from existing saved backtest names:

Update existing saved backtests after editing:

Backtest name is displayed in the header when viewing saved backtests. You can also edit the name directly by clicking on it:

Quickly switch to other saved backtests:

Shortcut to adjust backtest time periods for multiple backtests

On the backtest compare and combine screen, you can now change the backtest time period for all tests at once.

"Replace variation" on the compare and combine screen

Swap in a new variation in place of an existing test.

P/L chart and tooltips adjust when selecting an individual test

Better analysis of individual tests in the combined backtests screen.

New recipes to test ORB prices and opening range width in backtester and bots

Added days to max drawdowns analysis in backtester and bots

See source backtest when viewing a combined position list

Also included as a new column when exporting positions as to CSV.

Other updates since our last release:

• Added additional days options to the Expiration exit option
• Upgraded Community html editor
• New Time Periods in Top Bot Templates including 7, 14 and 30 days