In this video, I want to show you how to create custom profit target inputs which you can use inside of your monitor automations right inside of a bot at Option Alpha.

Now custom profit target inputs are really flexible and allow you to switch or swap the custom profit targets that you want to use based on different tickers or strategies that you might be running inside of your bots.

I’ll show you how to create these here in this video and inside of this demo bot we already have a scanner that’s currently running.

This is our "Trend and Momentum with Spreads" scanner which is looking for opportunities to make credit spread trades based on current trend and momentum indicators. That automation will start running when we turn on automations at the end of this video and we want to have a monitor automation that looks for potential to exit positions that we get into.

In this case we’re just going to use one side of this potential scanner which is the ability to enter call spread positions.

Notice that we’ve already previously built out this "Call Spread Manager" here and if we open up the actual editor for this particular automation you will notice that it has no custom input on the left-hand side. The automation simply starts by repeating through any short call spreads that the bot opens and checks to see if the premium on the position decrease by 90% since it was opened.

Now notice in this case we’re checking to see if premium went down because we’re selling call credit spreads. So, if the premium went down that would designate a profit opportunity for us.

We’ve already typed in a physical profit target of 90%. This means that we told the automation directly internal to the automation steps that we always wanted to take a profit of 90%.

Notice when I go to that decision recipe here, I’ve actually typed in the value of 90%. But what happens if you don’t always want to take a 90% profit or always check for a 90% profit? What if on some automations and bots that you’re running you want to check for a 50% profit or a 25% profit?

Well, we can use custom profit target inputs to facilitate this for our bots. All we need to do is just create a custom input field for this variable.

We can click on the blue icon here and create our new custom input. Again, custom inputs are just the flexible, valuable variable field that you can add to your automations and set later on. This means when you make changes to this, those changes flow through into the automation and can be dynamic based on how you add these different scanners to the bots that you’re working with.

In this case, we’ll call this one our “Call Spread Profit Target.” Something that we know we’re going to remember, and it’s going to be easy for us to remember when we start setting up these custom inputs.

We’ll set the default value to 50%. This means that when we first add this custom profit target input to any of our automations, if we forget to go in and change it, the default value sets back at 50% which is okay for us. Once we’re good to go we simply hit save.

Now inside of this automation you’ll notice we have something different here called our “Call Spread Profit Target.” When we save this, now we no longer see that 90% that we have typed in previously. That’s because we now have a custom input.

On the left-hand side you can see our new custom input is now added to this list of inputs and we have one usage. Notice again it’s really cool and flexible because it allows you to set this dynamically as you start to add the same automation to other bots that you’re running inside of your platform at Option Alpha.

Once we’re good to go with these changes, we simply exit out of here. And we can go over to the monitor itself and make a change to this custom input.

Now inside of this custom input, we can dynamically set the value here for our profit target right inside at the screen and change the custom input field to 75%. When we click save, now this automation, which is our "Call Spread Manager" for our demo account here, is going to check for 75% profit for any of the call credit spreads that we get into.

Now that’s really cool and easy for this one, but where this increases the flexibility across multiple bots is if you start trading other bots as well.

So, if we go over to our "CCI Swing with Spreads Trade," you can go over to automations and you can add another manager to your list of monitor automations. Again, we can select from one of the ones that we’ve previously used inside of our library. In this case we save this one, our “Call Spread Manager (Demo)” to our library here.

We can now reuse the same automation here inside of this new bot and set a different profit target for call spreads. Maybe for this particular CCI Swing strategy, we want to take profits for call spreads at 25% versus 75% in the demo example. Once we’re good to go we simply hit save, and now we have that new automation added to our particular bot.

This again uses different custom profit target inputs based on which bot you’re actually adding the automation to.