Matching Expiration Dates of Current Positions to New Positions

In this video, I want to show you how you can start matching expiration dates automatically inside of your bots so that you can match the expiration date of a current position to a potential new position that the bot might open.

Now, this is really helpful when you start using bots to automate processes that include hedging positions or rolling positions. In this trending short put spread bot, you'll notice that we've got one scanner that is opening some short put spreads.

So the bot mainly is trading short put spreads. We also have our short put spread manager, but we've also included another monitor automation that includes a potential to hedge the short put spread. This would be hedging the short put spread by selling the opposing short call spread, effectively creating an iron condor position out of our existing short put spread.

Now, when we start trading this strategy with our bot, you'll notice that we can get all the way down to the point inside of our automation here where we're checking to see if the position, which is our current short put spread, is being challenged and that the bot doesn't already have an existing short call spread opened.

So here down the "yes" path is where we might want to add a new open position action to hedge our existing short put spread. And we can just simply add an open position action here that opens a short call spread.

Now, inside of the open position action here, we would have to select this symbol and the legs and the strikes of everything that we wanted for the short call spread. But one of the really clever and creative things we can do is we can match the expiration day. Now, this is, again, very helpful because we don't want to add a new short call spread that is in a different expiration than our current short put spread.

In this case, for this bot, we want to match the expiration dates, and we don't know when that position might get challenged. So we have no idea of when that position would get challenged in the current expiration cycle. It could happen soon or could happen later in the expiration cycle. In either case, we can just go over to the recipe here to match the expiration date as an existing position that the bot is currently running through.

By using this recipe here to match the expiration to make it the same as one of the positions that it's currently looping through, we can ensure that the new position we enter has the same expiration date as our existing position. This again is perfect if you want to use bots to automate the process of hedging your trades.

Now, by matching up the expiration I can match that expiration date and then choose all of my legs and quantities and deltas here inside of the open position action. And once I've connected it to the same symbol that it's looping through, this would ensure that this new short call spread I'm using as a hedge is going to be in the same expiration as my current position.

Now you can do this throughout your bots and automations, and it works exactly the same for all the different types of strategies that you may trade. And it's a really creative and unique way to, again, let bots take all of the manual processes that you're doing now and offload those to automations.

Again, using that very simple recipe inside of our open position action, we can match the exact expiration date of any current position we have that's being challenged to the new position that the bot's going to open. This ensures that both of those positions are in the same expiration date, and you don't have to guess at it because the bots can match them automatically.