How to Move Bots to Your Live Trading Account

In this video, I'm going to show you how to move bots to your live trading account.

Now, note that inside of Option Alpha when you create or clone any bot, you have to connect that bot to a trading account. And you can connect that bot to a paper trading account like your Option Alpha paper trading account, or you can connect it to a live brokerage account using one of our broker partners.

But when you move a bot to a new account you actually have to create a clone of that bot or clone a bot from a new template. Note you can also create a brand new bot directly in your brokerage account. So there's many ways in which you can get your bots to your new live trading account.

Let's assume that you've been running a paper trading strategy, and you wanna start now trading that paper trading strategy in your live brokerage account. So we'll go here to our SMA crossover credit spread that we've been running in our paper trading account on Option Alpha.

We might like the performance of this strategy and generally how the strategy is set up and now we might want to trade this in our live account. So to start trading this strategy inside of our live account, we simply want to go up to the gear icon of the bot itself, and then clone the bot.

This creates a new bot version which is an exact replica of the existing bot that's trading in our paper trading account, but now allows us to change which account it's trading in. We can now select from one of our broker partners like we did here, and now create a new bot that's going to be running in that account.

Now, you have to do this in order to create a new fresh connection for that bot because you can't switch the connection from a paper trading account to a live trading account within the bot once it's created.

Once bots are created, they're connected and solidified in whatever account they were created in. But this allows you to do it very easily using a very simple clone. Plus with your new bot moving forward in your live account, you'll want to go ahead and use a brand new fresh bot anyway that gives you the ability to see the performance of the strategy in the live account vs. comparing the strategy in a paper trading account.

Once you're good to go with your new clone settings connected to your brand new account, simply go down to the bottom, and hit clone. Then you can go over and view your bot connected to your live account. You are on your new bot. You'll notice of course for security that automations are automatically turned off.

In order to turn on automations, you wanna reverify everything inside of your bot including any custom settings, and any automations that you're using. Once you're good to go you can simply turn on your automations and your bot now is going to start trading connected to your live account.