There are several ways to open positions inside a bot. You can use a scanner automation to evaluate the market for opportunities at scheduled intervals. You can manually open a position by selecting the “+” icon in the Positions tab and choosing any strategy type to open a position.
Or you can create a button in the Automations tab. Bot buttons enable you to open a position with a custom order when the button is clicked.
When you add a button, you can create a new automation or select an automation from your library. You can customize the button for any strategy type and make the automation as simple or complex as you like. Custom inputs can be set when the button is clicked, so you can tell the bot exactly what you want it to reference when the automation runs.
Bot buttons are especially useful when you want to run a specific automation instantly. Buttons save you time and allow you to avoid the process of manually entering a position.
Positions opened with a button can still be managed with monitor automations within the bot, so you’re still in complete control of all your positions.
Transcript
In this video tutorial I want to show you how to create custom bot buttons for custom order types inside of your bots.
Inside of the actual position tab inside of your bots, you will notice that you can open a position manually from here. This requires that you actually put in all of the information for the position that you are going to be opening every single time that you open a position.
And while you can do that in certain cases where you just want to open a one-off position, if you ever want to use some custom order types that you know you are going to be reusing over and over again, you can actually set up some bot buttons that accomplish the same goal.
So, I want to show you how to set those up here.
First, we’re going to go to the automations tab and we’re going to go to the section here to add our own button. We’ll set up two different types of custom buttons in this video and then you can set up more inside of your platform and your bots.
The first one here that we will set up, we’ll call this one “60 DTE Put Spread.” This one is going to be targeting a put spread with some very specific settings mainly focused around trading a put spread 60 days from expiration.
We can change the button style here and then we have to choose the automation. If you don’t already have some button automations set up you can just create a brand new automation right from the screen, and that’s what we’re going to do.
So, we’re going to call this one “Open 60 DTE Put Spread.” Then we will go here to start the automation and we’ll simply add an action to open a position anytime that this automation runs.
Now we’re going to do it this way here because any time we click the button to open a position, we just simply want the automation to go through and open a position like we tell it to. So here we’ll add our short put spread and then we’ll define all of the different variable fields.
First thing that we can do here is we can actually create another custom input here and call this "Ticker" and then we can set a default value for this ticker. Later we can then use this field to tell us what type of ticker we want to open this position on and we can trigger that when we click the button. For now, we’ll go ahead and save this custom variable field.
Everything else for this particular "60 DTE Put Spread," we’ll just make all the changes here like we normally would. So, we’ll change the actual expiration day here to 60 days and then we’ll make another change to only trade just the monthly contracts. Once we’re good to go here we just simply hit save.
Again, you want to make any of the other custom changes to any of the legs or the amount before you actually go ahead and save this automation. We’ll just reuse the rest of these defaults here and keep moving forward.
We’ll go ahead and save this and we’ll add it to our automation editor. Now this "60 DTE Put Spread" has been added with that custom ticker input. Once we’ve got everything in place we just simply close out of the editor, and you can see that our button has some additional fields now.
Now we can actually set the inputs and we can tell it specifically to run this one on SPY or we can set the input when the button is clicked. This is a little bit more advanced feature, but it gives you more flexibility to add buttons to your actual bot and then actually set the ticker or any of the parameters that you want moving forward. So, we’ll do this one with this current button.
Once we hit save and the screen refreshes, we can see our new button is here right at the top.
Any time we click this button, it will tell us to type in the ticker symbol. Because we want to set that input right away when we click the button and then we can choose SPY.
Again, you can go back to the previous step and you can select the ticker you want to use all the time, and then when you click the button, the automation runs instantly. Either one works well and we give you that flexibility. So that now opens a 60 DTE Put Spread.
Let’s add another button here that does another put spread but 30 days from expiration with any of the different series; so monthlys or weekly expiration. We’ll call this one “30 DTE Put Spread."
We’ll go here to the automation and we’ll just create a clone or a copy of the one that we just had here. This way we don’t have to re-put in all the information like we did on the original one.
We’ll just rename this one to “Open 30 DTE Put Spread," we’ll make one little tweak and change here to the actual settings of the open position action and we’ll change this to at least 30 days with any series. Again, this will do either the weekly’s or the monthly expirations.
I’ll still use that same ticker input field that we had before and that makes it a lot easier to create these new buttons. Once we’re good to go we simply exit out of the screen and again we can now set the inputs now or we can choose to set them when the button is clicked.
Again, we’ll choose to set them when the button is clicked, so we can tell the bot exactly which ticker symbol to run this on. Once we’re good to go we simply hit save.
Now again the screen refreshes and now we have two custom buttons here at the top, so that anytime that we want to go in and create some custom orders from the click of a button we can do it right here.
We click this button and set the ticker, it opens the 60 DTE Put Spread. We click this button here and it opens a 30 DTE Put Spread and you can naturally see how you can make really custom order types using bot buttons.
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