Quickly and Easily Test Bot Automations

In this video, I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily test any automation inside of Option Alpha. Now, the beauty of using a test is that you can test all of the logic of your automation, and you can test that across multiple bots and multiple scenarios really easily and quickly.

Inside this demo automation, you'll notice that I've got a number of different decisions and actions already set up. I'm looping through a number of different symbols, checking some minimum symbol volume for those symbols, and then making some probability of profit calculations before potentially opening a short put spread position.

Now you'll notice up at the top of all the automations is a button to run a test.

Now running a test sounds like exactly what it is. It's just running a test of what would happen if the bot were to be turned on and if the market criteria were used right now in a live scenario. You can choose which bot you wanna run this test on so you can actually stress test your logic and automation across different existing bots that you have right now.

You can even create a brand new bot from this screen here and test it in a brand new blank bot. To choose your bot, you just simply click the list of drop downs for available bots in your account and then select your bot. In this case, we'll just keep it on our demo bot.

Now you can actually test any custom inputs here, which is a really cool feature that allows you to, again, stress test the logic of your automation back and forth for different scenarios. So you could see how the bot would behave and what decisions it would make under different market criteria.

Right now, we have two custom inputs for this particular automation. First, we're asking the bot to check a minimum symbol volume for the day of 3 million shares.

Next, we're checking to see if the petition that we're going to enter into has a minimum probability of profit of 70%. This prevents the bot from entering new positions if the probability of profit is below this percentage.

So I'm going to go ahead and start my test. Now my test ran, and you can see that it was looping through these symbols that we had in our position loop. The first symbol that it encountered was SPY, and notice you can see every possible decision and the outcome of every decision right here inside of the test.

First, you can see that the symbol volume needed to be greater than our input of three million. We can actually click on this value here, and you can see that the symbol volume for the day was significantly larger than our minimum threshold. So it passed that decision and continued down to the next decision.

In this case, it ended in a no decision. That's because if we were checking to see if this SPY short put spread had a probability of success over 70%, the bot determined that when the test was run, the chance of success was just 66.13%. So the bot prevented the open position action from being submitted.

Again, this is just all a test scenario of what would happen in live environment when you turn on your automations. We can toggle over to the next ticker symbol, and you can see that for FXI, we basically got the same decisions. FXI's volume was above our threshold, but it didn't have a high enough probability of profit.

If we go to the next one, GLD, you can see that GLD did meet our minimum criteria for symbol volume, as well as a probability of profit over our 70% threshold. So if we were to turn on this bot, we would expect a new position order to be submitted to our broker.

Again, because this is just a test, the order did not actually go to our broker, but it helps us get an idea or an understanding of what would happen in a live environment.

Notice again you can click on any of these decisions and see exactly what details and what information the bot is using to make decisions. In this case, the GLD position that it analyzed had a chance of profit of 73.37%, which was over our minimum threshold.

Now we can go back here and check out the last one here, which is EFA. Notice that EFA, again, like FXI and SPY, did not meet our minimum probability of profit threshold. Now, this one test was run, but we're not limited in the number of test we can run. And we encourage you to run test all the time inside of your automations.

Now let's change this up to a higher threshold for the volume on the actual underlying symbol. We'll change this minimum volume for the day to 5 million and change the probability of profit threshold to something a little bit higher, like 75%.

Again, these are all just test to see how the bot would make decisions and to double-check our criteria when we're building out our automation.

We go through SPY, which had a significantly higher volume, but when we get to other tickers symbols like GLD, in this particular test scenario, GLD actually failed at the minimum symbol volume. This is because if we click on it here, you can see that the symbol volume was above 3 million, which is what we used in the original test. But on this new test, we used 5 million, and GLD does not have volume yet of 5 million shares for the day.

Now, when the automation continues to run, if GLD ever did have volume over 5 million shares for the day, then it would go down the yes path and continue to the next decision. Same thing would be true for any of the tickers inside of our automations.

Again, this is a really cool way for us to test and stress test the logic of anything that we're doing inside of our bots.

Whenever we're done, we just simply exit out of the test, and we go back to our automation editor. We can make any changes or modifications to our automation, adding new decisions, adding new actions, or using switches and tags and then stress test all of that logic again by just simply running a test.

Again, test are wonderful tools at your disposal. To run as many test as you want to inside of your bots on Option Alpha. We encourage you to run test over and over again to make sure that the bots are doing exactly what you want them to do using the decisions that you've set up and stress testing your logic and your bot-building processes as you go.