Setup Automated Profit Targets and Stop Losses

In this video, I want to show you how to set up automated profit targets and stop losses for your bots inside of Option Alpha. So if you're a trader who's tired of manually placing your GTC orders and always monitoring positions for either a stop loss or a profit target, now you can set up all of your profit targets and stop losses completely automated.

So inside of this bot here, which is our high IV rank iron condors bot, we already have a scanner automation that set up to look for high IV rank opportunities. Whenever IV rank is really high and all of our liquidity filters pass, it trades iron condors on a basket of tickers that we have inside of the bot.

But now, what we want to do is we want to set up our monitor automation to monitor any positions that the bot opens. Any iron condors that the bot opens, we want to monitor for profit targets or potential stop losses. Again, this is just one way that you can use bots and automations inside of your account.

So to build out our monitor automation, we'll simply click on the plus icon here to add a monitor to our bot. We can select from the drop-down menu and choose to build a new automation, or we can always choose to create a copy or reuse any other automations that we have in our library.

In this example, we'll build out a brand new monitor automation. We can call this our "Iron Condor Monitor." That way, we know exactly what it's doing when it runs inside of our bot.

To do this, we're simply going to start with a position loop. Position loops are great because they allow you to loop through every position that the bot has and specify exactly how you want to make decisions for each individual position.

Now, remember, position loops would go inside of your monitor automation because the monitor automations are going to be managing actual positions. So it makes sense that anything that requires a position goes inside of that monitor automation.

Once we click on the position loop, we can specify what type of position. We can say any position at all, or we can specify exactly how we want to manage position types like iron condor. This would mean that this particular monitor automation would ignore any other position that the bot has that's not an iron condor. And that's what we want to do in this case. We exactly want to tell the bot to run through and loop through every position that is an iron condor.

If the bot has a short put spread or a long call option, we want the bot to manage those differently with different automations. In this case, we want the bot always to loop through our iron condor positions.

Now we want the bot to start making some decisions. So we simply add another action and tell the bot that we want to make a decision on each single iron condor position that we have. We're going to go down to the list of position recipes.

As the name suggests, the position recipes require that this is added after a position loop because the bot is going to pull in the information for every single position. And in this case, we first want the bot to check and see if we have a profit.

Now, remember, when we're trading iron condors, iron condors are short premium positions, which means that we're selling options, and we want the value of those options to go down. That would represent a profit for those positions. So for this position recipe, we're going to connect the position to whatever position the bot is currently looping through. We're going to check and see if the position premium decreased by a certain amount.

By checking to see if the position premium decreased, we're going to be checking for a potential profit on our iron condors. Remember, when the premium goes down for iron condors, that represents a profit.

Here, we can just tell the bot exactly how much of a decrease in premium we want to check for for our potential profit, something like 50%. If the premium goes down by 50% since it was opened, that would represent a 50% profit.

So we add that decision recipe to our automation editor. Now we simply just add down the yes path a close position action. This tells the bot that if the premium does go down by 50%, which would represent that 50% profit, we want the bot to go ahead and close the position.

So we had a close position action connected to whatever position the bot is looping through and then simply hit "Save." Now we have one part of our automated strategies set up where it's checking for a 50% profit and then closing any positions that meet that criteria.

Now remember, because you're using automated bots, this is constantly checking for your 50% profit at every scan interval for your bots.

Now, if you don't have a 50% profit, you might want to check for some sort of stop loss. Again, this is if you're using stop losses for your trading.

So down the "No" path, we're going to have the bot make another decision. And we're going to reuse the same recipe that we use before, only this time we're going to use it for position premium increase.

Again, because we're trading an iron condors, which are short premium options selling strategies, if the premium goes up or increases, that would represent a loss on this iron condor position.

So we can use the same recipe with the different toggle here for using it as our stop loss recipe. We're going to connect this to the position that it's currently looping through and then leave the switch here to position premium increased. We can set the increase to something like 100% since it was opened. This would check and see if the value or premium of that iron condor position went up by 100% since it was opened, and that might be our stop loss level that we would want to close the position.

So once we hit "Save," that new decision has been added to our automation editor. In this case, now, down the "Yes" path, we also want to add a close position action. We want to give the bot approval and authority to go ahead and close any position where the premium increases by 100% since it was opened.

So now, inside of this iron condor monitor automation, we have our profit-taking recipe here, and we have our stop loss recipe here. And everything is now completely automated.

So as soon as we're ready to go, we just simply hit "Save" and then add this monitor automation to our high IV rank iron condor bot. Now our bot has a scanner automation which is going to be looking through the portfolio of tickers looking for a high IV rank opportunities and then entering iron condors.

And now, we built out a very simple and powerful monitor automation that's simply loops through any iron condor positions that the bot has, checks to see if we have a potential profit of 50% if we do close the position and if we don't have a profit, checks to see if we have a stop loss of 100%. And if we do have hit that stop loss level, then go ahead and close the position as well.

Again, fully automated trading easily right inside one single platform.