Trade Ideas scans continuously during market hours (9:35am - 3:55pm) and finds trade ideas in 3 ways:

1. It analyzes the returns of thousands of position setups used by all of us (underlying symbol, leg deltas, days to expiration, etc) and loads the current market data for the top performing position setups and compares them looking for opportunities using Reward/Risk, EV (expected value) and Alpha (EV / Max Loss).
2. It examines every option series expiring in 45 days or less that falls on a Friday and matches up every possible combination of legs at various delta values (.50, .45, .425, .40, .375, .35, .325, .30, .275, .25, .20, .15, .10) looking for opportunities.
3. It examines all current open positions in the platform looking for opportunities.

Yes, 100%. We built our own paper trading engine so you can paper trade as much as you want right inside Option Alpha without having to connect to a brokerage. Paper trading allows you to test your bot’s automation logic risk-free, in real-time, with live market conditions. Plus, you leverage the power of bots to test limitless strategies, ideas, and portfolio combinations so you're comfortable with autotrading before you start trading live.