What’s New in Option Alpha: October 2025

Gamma Exposure (GEX) Backtesting and Automation

As part of this release, we added additional functionality around Gamma Exposure trading. If you're not familiar with GEX based trading, you may want check out this new Youtube playlist. While we are just in the beginning stages of experimenting with how we can combine GEX trading with automation, we see an opportunity for the additional information GEX provides to improve our overall results as options traders.

Here is an example GEX backtest that trades a short put spread and produces solid returns with a low drawdown. It looks for an opportunity to trade when the strike with the maximum put GEX is 2x more than any other strike and the reward/risk ratio available is 50% or higher. The backtest combines the results of looking for the trade at 9:45am and 10:00am so it could easily be automated to run a scanner with time period of 9:45am to 10:00am (or later).

If you find an interesting trading strategy using GEX while backtesting, please share it in the community so we can all learn and grow together!

Visualize trading results by day in Analyzer

You can also now click on any day to drill to the closed position list for that particular day.

New Stop Loss $ Exit Option

This one was highly requested and is now available within bots.

View Max Drawdown Periods in the backtester

Seeing the periods of drawdown a strategy had in the past can help foster resilience when experiencing a drawdown in the present.

Opening Range Breakout now supported for "Magnificent 7" tickers

ORB decision recipes are now supported in bots for TSLA, NVDA, GOOGL, AMZN, AAPL, MSFT and META.

Add notes to positions

Supports adding links and images. I've been using it to save GEX snapshots when I open 0DTE trades.

Import saved backtests into the backtester compare screen

Save individual backtests on backtester compare screen

New filters for market moving events in bots and backtester

One of our OA traders, Dan Martin, shared research he did with us about filtering market event days from the ORB trading strategy. The results looked promising so we decided to add filters for the events to the backtester and bots. We also threw in Full Moon just in case. ;)

4 of the recent ORB 60m strategy losses have come on major event days where the trend appears to less reliable. I will be updating the ORB 60m bot template to avoid several additional days in response to this research.

Test if an opportunity has a conflicting leg within the same brokerage account

Note: this only only tests for conflicting legs within positions managed by OA.

Test IV Rank OHLC values within bots

The OA backtester uses the previous close IV Rank value but bots could only use the live intraday IV rank value. This decision now allows you to change your bot to use the close value as well if you want it to line up more closely when rerunning backtests instead of using the live intraday value.

New GEX decisions in bots

These decisions allow for testing various Gamma Exposure (GEX) levels, strikes, and other values within your bot strategy.

New GEX entry filters in backtester

Select position legs based on GEX in bots and backtester

Added new market events to the OA calendar

New recipe to compare numeric value

This decision recipe has several creative use cases. For example, set [value 1] as an input and use it to test for different values or check the value that has been supplied to the input.

Example Usages

As automation input to toggle between several modes:

Testing a numeric input value:

Additional updates...

• TastyTrade now uses OAuth to authorize trading on the tastytrade.com
• The New Position and Close Position screen Final Price +/- buttons now move the price in .05 increments for SPX
• Improvements to SmartPricing algorithm for SPX
• Fixed backtest comparison layout issue when 4 tests are present
• Use command/control to open top bot templates in a new tab/window
• Added "Cancel close" button to address closing positions becoming hung