Finding Trades with Scanner Automations

The text is the output of AI-based and/or outsourced transcribing from the audio and/or video recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases, it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. This transcript is provided for educational purposes only. Nothing that you read here constitutes investment advice or should be construed as a recommendation to make any specific investment decision. Any views expressed are solely those of the speaker and should not be relied upon to make decisions.

Welcome, everyone, to the live workshop that we're doing. Today we're gonna be spending all of our time focused on finding trades using scanner automations. My hope is that I give you a number of different ideas and thought processes to go through on how you can use automations and particular scanners to help you find filter, scan list of trades, scan tickers, scan multiple list of tickers inside of your bots.

So I hope that today's session is not; it can't be the end all be all because there's too many things you can do with scanners, but I hope it gives you really good primer on not only what scanners are which we'll cover here first, but also to some really cool ideas on how we can use scanners inside of our bots. We will be bouncing back and forth between a lot of different ones. This one is not gonna be a workshop where we build a bot from scratch like some other ones. We're gonna be focusing today, like I said, purely on scanner automations.

Number one is like I said, we're gonna walk through the basics of scanner automations. How they help you find and enter trades inside of your bots. We'll spend just a little bit of time on this. If you're brand new, then this will be helpful. We're gonna be focusing on scanners today. We won't be doing this much on monitors, but you'll get the gist once we get in here, and you can see some of the stuff on scanners, okay?

Then what we're gonna do, number two, is we're gonna just spend a little bit time exploring new ways to harness scanners and the power of scanners. I'm gonna show you some examples of using scanners with multiple symbol loops, which maybe some of you didn't know you can actually do. You can do multiple symbol loops in your bots. And bot tagging and switches. So we're gonna go from beginner to some more advanced stuff. Again, you can feel free to go back through some of the video training and stuff like that if you want to. If you want to dive deeper into some of the stuff. I hope that will give you good, a really good primer off.

Third thing we're gonna do is we're gonna highlight some of the opportunity filtering prior to opening positions. This is always a fan favorite. We did in entire workshop just purely on opportunity filtering, which was recorded in the workshop section right on the website. So that's a really good one to use as well. That one, like, did what we do here in the workshop and did a deep dive just on opportunity filtering and how you can use that in your positions.

And then last thing that we're gonna do here is we're gonna leverage some custom inputs. So if you've ever been to workshops, or you use bots or start using it, custom inputs are the bomb. They are the bomb. They allow you to do so, so, so much with your bots and automations. If you don't use them, you will love using them moving forward.

Here's the thing I wanna do with scanner automations, to begin with. So I wanna start with just a brand new bot. I'm gonna quickly just create a very simple like bot shell. We'll just call it demo scanner bot. And we're just gonna give it, you know, put it into an account. Doesn't matter what it is right now. Give it some allocation. Again, doesn't matter right now. And then we're gonna give it some position limits.

Now, these I just want to quickly talk about because they all related to scanners, so this is where we start kind of thinking through and understanding a little bit about how we built out this platform and how you can use scanners to your advantage.

So in this very quick bot shell that I'm gonna create, which is, again, a very simple. Just I'm calling it a demo bot. It doesn't really matter. Not gonna really do anything. We'll just kinda build it out together. I'm giving the bot some position limits. So the position limits here are going to turn off scanners when these position limits are hit. So you wanna think about these as the point at which you tell the bot to stop entering new trades.

Now notice I said entering new trades, opening positions. You are never limited on closing positions. If you open ten positions, you can close ten positions. You're never limited on closing positions, which makes a lot of sense because we would never want to limit the ability of a bot to close, say, profitable positions, right? If you had ten profitable positions, you want to close them all right away. So what these positions limits are? Oh, they are limits and safe cards that prevent the bot or stop the bot from entering new positions. And you can do these on a daily basis or in total. Does that make sense?

So if I were to set this really quick to daily, one position, that means that this is the maximum amount of positions the bot can open in a day. That could be one share. That's one position. It could be selling ten iron condors. That could be one position, right? Just one new trade opened today. Now it doesn't mean that it's going to stop entering orders after one order is submitted. It's just that the bot can only open one real position per day. The total position limit is how many positions the bot can have in total, right?

So this is where you tell the bot, hey bot, stop looking for new positions once you reach this total. So if, for example, I was to set this to two positions in total and one position in the daily limit. That means that the bot could open a new position today, and then it would stop, and then it would start looking for a new position tomorrow, and it could open a new position tomorrow, right? But at that point, now it's got two positions in total, so now the bot stops looking for new positions; as soon as one of those positions gets closed or gets removed from the bot, then the bot starts looking for new positions again.

So if I were to go move this up to, say, four positions in total, I basically could get to four positions only if the bot entered one position today, one the next day, one another day, and one another day, right? So I'm telling the bots specifically, hey bot, you are only allowed to get into one position at a time, and at most, you can get into four positions in total.
Here's what happens in the bots when you hit these limits. When you hit these limits, all that it does is it automatically takes a scanner and basically puts it into sleep mode. So we say, good night, bot, like, go to sleep. Stop looking for new positions until another slot opens up. So these are really important, and again, they are really key for safeguarding your portfolio or how you wanna trade.

So we're gonna start this at one and one for right now, and just create our bot, and then we're gonna click the button to go and view our bot. Now over in the automations tab, this is where all the magic happens. So inside of our bot right now, it is a completely blank shell. There's nothing in it. There's no position, right? All we did was create our shell like this structure of our bot. And so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go into our automations tab, and we're gonna start actually building out our automations.

Now today, we're focusing purely on scanner automations. Scanner automations are just simply; listen to me clearly on this one. They're just simply the rules that you give the bot all the decisions, all the actions you want the bot to take to find and enter new positions. Let me say it again. Your scanners are just automations that you're gonna set up to tell the bot what to look for, what decisions to make. Basically, everything that you would do to get into a new position, okay?

It's not managing the position, right? It's not adjusting the position. Your scanner is just scanning for opportunities and trying to fill trades. It's trying to find those great opportunities, whatever they are, for your strategy and trying to fill trades. So when I go to add my first scanner, and I just click on the plus icon here to add a scanner. I'm gonna hit the dropdown, and I'm gonna create a brand-new scanner. We're gonna create a very simple scanner real quick together just so you can kinda see the logic behind how it works, and then we'll go little bit faster if you guys are okay with that.

Now notice that we can create scanners from and reuse existing automations in our library. So as soon as we save one of these automations or we clone a bot template and save somebody else's one, we can just reuse it over and over and over again. It's a beauty of using automations. We don't have to create them from scratch every single time. But if you wanted to create a brand new one, you just simply click on the button that say create a new automation. We'll just call it our demo scanner automation.

So here's how the scanner works. A scanner basically is going to start whenever the bot is turned on and only runs if the bot has enough position limits that it hasn't hit yet, right? So that it could enter a new position. So when your bot turns on, your scanner automations will start running if the bot has room to add a new position. So in our case, right? We told the bot you can enter one position, and it doesn't have any positions because it's a brand new bot. So as soon as we turn this thing on, this automation will start running.

Now with your scanners, you're gonna wanna tell the bot to do all the crazy awesome thing that you would normally do yourself manually. And we do this through adding actions to the bot automation. So here, inside of our scanner, it's completely blank. We're gonna click on the plus icon to add an action to the automation. Now, this is our list of actions that we can add to the automation. We can have the bot do things like make a decision. We can have the bot do things like open a position, or close a position, or send us a notification, or tag some of our positions or tag the bot itself. We can use tags to do really cool things.

So these are some of the things that we can have the bot do. Because we're using a scanner, we're gonna be mainly using decisions, open position actions, and something called a symbol loop, okay? Those are the main things that we're gonna be using inside of our scanner. You're not limited to that. You can use all of these in here, and you can put them together in really crazy combinations, but for the most part, you wanna use those three things inside of your scanners; decisions, the open position action, and then symbol loops, okay?

So the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna start with a symbol loop, which is down here. A symbol loop basically sounds exactly like what it is. You're telling the bot that you want the bot to scan through a list of ticker symbols. So you might have a favorite list of ticker symbols. You might have a tech list of ticker symbols. It might be fangs symbol for this bot and, you know, like, industrial for another bot. so all you're doing is you're just telling the bot what symbols you want it to loop through and basically scan through your mini watch list for this particular automation.

So, in this case, we're just gonna pick some of our top ETFs, right? So you can just select a number of your ETFs, or if you wanted to, you can type in a particular symbol like Tesla or Netflix or whatever, okay? So once you're good to go, you simply hit done. Now the bot knows that it's gonna scan through this list of symbols. That's like you're priming the bot, you're telling the bot, hey bot, all of the universe of things you're looking at, you know, you could look at, this is what I need you to focus on. These symbols are the ones that I would possibly wanna make a trade. Okay? Once you're good to go, you simply hit save, and that kinda starts our bot right here with a symbol loop.

We're telling the bot, hey, this is our watch list of symbols that we want the bot to go through. So now, what do we wanna do with this list? Now what we're gonna do, and this is the most traditional thing that you could do, is you're gonna add another action, and then you're gonna go here to decisions. Now decisions are super, super powerful. Basically, what decisions are are natural language recipes. See how they're written out in natural language. Symbol price is above 100 or symbol type is stock or symbol volume is greater than some value, right?

It's just written out in natural language, and you can add unlimited amount of these recipes, these decision recipes, to your actual automation. So we have lots of groups here like we have indicator groups, right? Like MACD, and Bollinger Bands, RSI and stochastics, and all kinds of things. You could have general ones like today is Monday, or today is Thursday, or the market time is after 9 AM but before 10 AM. Whatever. You could do all of these in here.

You could also do some symbol loops like the bot open a position a couple days ago, or the bot's PNL is greater than some value, or the symbol's probability of being above or below a certain price is more than 70%. So there's tons and tons of different decision recipes that you have available to you inside of here. Okay?

Now any one of these has variable fields that you can see that are underlined because you can change and swap and edit the variables. So, for example, this one. You can have the symbol volume is greater than some value, but you'll notice that if I just click on volume because it's a variable, I can actually change this to the symbol's high price or the symbol's mark price, or the close price, or the open price, or the standard deviation of the symbol currently, right? Like the low price or the bid/ask spread of the symbol, right? I can just modify any of these variables as I go.

And again, you can just create an infinite combination of these different decision recipes. So let's do a very simple one, to begin with. Let's do this one here, which is IV rank. I think, maybe, most people are familiar with IV rank. IV rank is just a way to judge how high volatility is, like how much implied volatility is expected in the options right now. So we could do something like the symbol's IV rank is above some numbers, say the 50th rank level. Right? Usually, it's a number from 0-100.

So we've got something with really high implied volatility, relatively high implied volatility. We just add this recipe and this decision to our automation. So here with the symbol, when we have the symbol field, I could obviously type in the symbol like SPY and notice if I select SPY, it will always check SPY. So follow along with me closely here. I have told the bot, hey, Mr. Bot, after you're done looping through all of these symbols that you have here, check SPY IV rank.

Now, this is cool because if you do wanna check one particular thing as your broad-based total global input. You could do SPY, or I could do something super cool called using a custom input. Instead of using SPY, I could click this box here, which is our little icon for custom inputs. And when you click this, you can connect this decision to whatever symbol the bot is currently looping through. So think about it this way, when the bot starts scanning this list of tickers, it's going to individually check each and every ticker's implied volatility. So it's gonna check XLE and XLF and QQQ and EFA and XRT and TLT and bla bla bla.

So if I connect this to that symbol that the bot is currently looping through, it's going to individually check every single symbol's IV rank. So once I'm done with this particular recipe, all I do is hit save and then add it to my automation editor. So when the automation starts running, my scanner, which is looking for trades for me, it's going to pull down information on all of these symbols and then, one by one, go through and check every symbol's IV rank to see if it's above 50. And if it is above 50 for that symbol, it will continue down the yes path.

It's basically asking a question, is this symbol's IV rank above 50? Yes. Okay, go down this path for that symbol. No, go down this path for another symbol. You can actually test this logic, and I would encourage you to do this inside of your automations all the time. So we can test this logic and see how it would perform in a real environment here by just running a test, so if I click the button up here to run a test. I can run a test in the demo bot that I've already created, and I can start the test.

Now look what happen at this test. Again, I ran it right now. This is current live market pricing, no delay. We never do any delay data or anything like that. So it's looping through XLE, XLF, QQQ, etc. For XLE, which is the first one, it was asking the bot the question. Is the symbol's IV rank above 50? No. What's the answer for XLE? You can actually click on the decision and see more information about that. No, XLE's rank is below 50. Okay, thanks, bot. I appreciate it. You're confirming what I already knew, thank you. Right?

Now let's go to the next one. XLF? Nope. QQQ? Yes, look at that. See? So you can see like QQQ's IV rank is above 50. Notice how if I just toggle between all the different tickers that the bot is going through, I get different results for different things because it's checking each individual ticker one by one. So with a symbol loop, you're having the bot take all that information and, one by one, make decisions for every single ticker that you're looking at. This is the power of using these bots since you can basically take these bots and then have the bots make multiple decision for every single stock and symbol that you're looking at.

So what if we wanna do something else? Like symbol's IV rank is above 50. Okay, great. Now down the yes path, we're gonna add some more decisions. So I'm gonna click here to this plus icon down the yes path. Go over to add another decision, and I'm gonna go to a different recipe. Maybe I want to go to something like an RSI recipe. So I'm gonna go here to this recipe, which is the symbol's 14 day RSI. Again, I don't wanna select the actual symbol. I wanna connect it to the custom input. The symbol that it's currently looping through right now.

This is what makes it so powerful because if I connect this field, then I can swap out these symbols anytime I want. I can change out the symbols anywhere. I can make multiple bots with multiple symbols and reuse this automation over and over and over again. So now I'm gonna say, okay, whatever symbol it's looking at, look at the 14 day RSI. Notice that RSI is just one of many different indicators that uses this recipe, right? So this recipe is a very simple one. It doesn't require too much customization, so a lot of different indicators use this recipe.

Look at the intraday value and see if it's above 80, right? 80 is a very common RSI value. So I just type in 80, and then I just save. And now notice how my decision tree continues to be built out. So for some symbols, it might go yes, here, or no here. Or some it might say yes, here and yes, here and then continue down the yes path. So we're just gonna keep going and going and going.

So again, run the test. See how this performs. So XLE, is my IV rank above 50? No. what about XLF? No. Okay, QQQ. Yes, it was above 50, so what did the bot do? Just for QQQ, it continue down the yes path because that decision was a yes. IV rank above 50, yes. Just for QQQ. Now check the RSI value. Is the RSI value for Q's above 80? Nope, it's 49. So the answer to that question for the Q was no. what about something else? Let's go to EFA. Maybe XRT. Yes, it's above 50. No, it's not a high RSI. What about TLT, or EEM, or any of these other ones. But you can see as we go through which is modifying all of the decisions as it goes down the decision tree.

So once you have, and let's assume for the sake of argument, and then I'll come out. Once we're done here, I'll show you like a really, like a bigger built-out scanner if you need to build out one bigger. Some of your strategies, they may not need a big scanner. Okay, so I don't want you to think that you have to come in and build out this elaborate, awesome, big, macho scanner, right? Some strategies might be very simple. But what I want to show you what you can do now is after you've made all the decisions that you want to eventually say yes, this is a trading opportunity for me, okay? I wanna make sure that's clear. You have the bot do all of that decision-making.

Is the symbol's IV rank perfect? Is the technicals perfect? The volatility is perfect. The volume is perfect. Whatever. You have the bot make all those decisions for you. Eventually, what you want to get to down either of these paths. Any path that you're on is, you want your scanner to get to the point of opening a position. Would you guys agree? Like there's a phase in your bot building that is building out and filtering the universe of potential trades, and then there's a point in which you have to enter an order. Like the things have been so good and you got the perfect setup you wanted, you enter a position.

So whenever you get to that point, and let's assume it's here on this one. You're gonna click the plus icon, and instead of adding another decision or another action, you're simply gonna tell the bot to open a position. That's it. You're gonna click on the action to open a position, and then you're gonna tell the bot exactly what position you want to open. Now I'm not gonna go through all of these because we've got videos on every little detail of the open position action, but let's assume that if RSI is high and implied volatility rank is high that you want to sell a call spread, right? That's a very normal strategy, so you select the short call spread. You select all of your different criteria, how far out you want the call spread to be, the legs, the contracts, how you want to send the order using smart pricing, where you do rapid-fire orders to the broker, right? You do all of that.

And the last thing you do here is you connect the symbol to what? That same symbol that it's looping through. So whatever symbol eventually got to this open position action, well, that's the symbol that we want to trade, right? Now it could be one symbol. It could be two symbols that day, right? But the bot is only gonna open that first position, whatever position it got to first, and only that one because remember when we started, we told the bot it only could do one position at a time, okay?

So we're scanning this universe of tickers that we have here, but we're telling the bot, hey, look, once you get into a position, in this case, right? In this example. We told you one position and one position max, so it would only grab that first position. Okay? Once you're good to go, you simply hit save, and you add your open position action to your bot. so notice at some point, at some point, you now have an open position action inside of your scanner. And that's where your scanners are gonna stop, essentially. You could do a couple other things after that. You could do some tags, send yourself a notification if you want to, but ultimately this is the main goal. The main goal of a scanner is to get to the point at which you are opening a position in your scanner automation.

Again, you could just test the logic here, and we'll test all the way through. See if anything right now would open a position, and I don't think so because RSI is low for most of these things anyway. Okay? Now once you're good to go, you're 100% done with your scanner. You know exactly how it's gonna be built out. All you simply wanna do is hit save, and by saving it here, you're saving it to your bot that you have.

So when I hit save, and then I reconfirm that's the scanner that I want. Notice that it's just get dumped right into my particular bot. And that's pretty cool, right? Now that bot has a scanner automation that is built into it. So if I were to turn on the bot and let it start scanning, at the next interval that would start running these scanners, it would start looking for an opportunity to open a position. And we're just gonna let it run while we're here on the workshop here together. Okay?

Now, remember, inside of our scanner, just a recap. We've told the bot, hey, you have one position you can get into, and that's it, right? You have one position you can get into, and that's it, but inside of our scanner, we're allowing it to scan a bigger universe of tickers, right? You don't have to just have one ticker per bot. You can have a bot that scans many universe of tickers. You could have multiple bots that scan multiple different list of tickers; some techs, some industrials, some financials, whatever. And then you build them into these bots.

I want to jump from here into other bots because rather than building out scanners one by one. I think what's more helpful to you is now to start seeing how multiple scanners can be built and how scanners can do many different things. So I don't wanna go through like we're gonna build out a scanner. We kinda built out a scanner right there, right? But now what I want to do is I want to move to some other bots, and I wanna show you a lot of different examples of how scanners can work inside of different bots.

So it gives you a lot of different ideas, and I hope I explode your mind with ideas. Okay? Great. What I'm gonna do is I wanna go over to another bot and this time, what I wanna go to is I wanna go to this bot which is the honey badger. If you haven't seen a honey badger before, it's a friendly, favorite bot of mine only because I just really like the name, okay? So just really like the name. So honey badger doesn't matter what the name is. The honey badger has one scanner, okay? One scanner. But what's unique about this particular scanner is that this scanner could open multiple types of positions. And this is one of the first things I wanna show you with the power of scanners is that your one scanner, and it really just depends on how you wanna do your trading.

So just so you know, you don't have to do it this way. There's multiple ways to do this, as I'll show you during the workshop, but this particular scanner has the potential to open three different types of trades, okay? So if I click on the scanner, you can see that the honey badger has a lot more information but let me go through just the basics of it. It's actually not that bad, not that complicated, right? All it's doing is it's doing couple things, and then it has the potential to open three different types of trades. Okay?

So I wanna start actually at the bottom. Notice in the honey badger that I have three different open position actions. So inside of this one scanner, whereas the one that we built out earlier only open that short call spread, right? It had a very specific target, and it only open that short call spread. Notice that you can have your scanner open many different types of trades. Basically, whatever trade is the appropriate trade for that market environment that you tend to find yourself in, or whatever it is, okay?

So this particular honey badger could open an iron condor, it could open a short put spread, or it could open a short call spread. Notice that it would only open those respective trades if the ticker that we're looking at or the tickers that we're looking at got to those respective levels, right? Got to that particular path, that particular branch of decision-making, right? Does that make sense?

So it would only open a short call spread if it got here. It only open a short put spread if it got here, and an iron condor if it got here, okay? Now, if I go back up, what is this bot doing? When this automation starts running, it is checking two different technical indicators at the same time. So in the other example, we check things one by one. You don't have to do that. You could do a grouped decision like this where we're asking the bot to check and see if the ticker's RSI is high and CCI is high at the same time.

So not one or the other, not or. You can swap this out to an or, right? But we're gonna leave it as an and. We're checking both technical, and in order for us to continue down the yes path, both technical have to be exactly high as we define them, like overbought as we define them. Okay? If that's the case, then notice that the bot travels down the yes path. So if we get a yes response to both of those, then the bot travels down the yes path.

Now, if neither technical are overbought, the bot would travel down the no path, and it goes to another decision. Notice that this one is very similar to the first one. Only this time, we're checking okay bot; if the technicals aren't overbought, are the technicals oversold? Is RSI low, and is CCI low? That would suggest that maybe the ticker that we're looking at is oversold. Right? Does that make sense?

So now we're asking the bot to make different sets of decisions based on the result of the first decision. The questions that we ask the bot. Now, if the answer to this is yes, like no, it's not overbought, but yes, it's oversold. Well, then it goes down the path towards selling a short put spread. Kinda cool, right? That's why I like to call it honey badger; when they first came up with this is because it's like it doesn't care. Has no emotions. The bot doesn't care where the technicals are. It's just gonna make basically a rational decision based on the data and the logic of the automation, okay?

Now, if neither of these are true, so the technicals are not overbought, they're not oversold, then it goes into entering a neutral iron condor position. So now you can start to see how the automation in the bot can get to the point using one scanner of opening multiple different types of positions. And it's all based on what the market is showing at the time that we're gonna try to get into a new position.

So notice that when we get to these decision points, right? So we get to the point of which we're making the decisions on some technical analysis, that's cool, that's awesome. But notice that before we get to the point of opening a position, there's these big blocks of decisions in between. You guys see these? These big blocks of decisions in between. These decisions here are what are called opportunity recipes. They're just decisions, just like your other decisions, but they are specifically geared around filtering a potential trading opportunity.

So we've told the bot that we want to get into, for example, a short call spread. Sixty days to expiration with a 30 delta, $700 of risks total, whatever the case is, right? We've told the bot this is what we want to get into. What we can actually do is we can actually put some decisions in front of that open position action that checks data on that potential position before we send the order to our broker. Now again, think about this logically. When you trade right now, do you just close your eyes? I wish you guys can see me right now. My hands over my eyes. Do you close your eyes and just click on strategies and hope it works out.

No. You probably check things, right? Like you check the bid/ask spread, or you check the open interest, or you check the rate of return or the probability of success. Do you guys do these stuff? So all we do here inside of our automations is we're doing the same thing. We're having the bot pull in an opportunity. We're having the bot taking that opportunity that we just built that we want to trade. We're saying, okay, bot, check this short call spread and whatever ticker I'm looking at, pull the information for a 60 day, 30 delta, ten delta short call spread, and make sure the rate of return is higher than the hurdle rate that I'm gonna set.

Like for some people, if you're trading a short call spread, you want to make sure you have rate of return that's 30% or 40% or 10% of whatever it is for you. It just makes logical sense that we would do that, right? We can also have the bot check things like open interest, so we can have the bot pull the short call leg specifically. So pull data on the short call leg, and check the open interest of that leg. Now again, notice because these are variables, I can check the ask price of the short leg. I can check the delta, the theta, the vega, the gamma, the intrinsic value, the extrinsic value, the mark price, the high price, the low price, the opening price. You can check whatever you want, right?

But in this case, I'm saying check the open interest on that short call leg and make sure that enough people have traded that short call leg that before I sent my order, I don't wanna be swimming in a pool that's low of liquidity. So you can do that. You can also have the bot do things like check the bid/ask spread. Just check the entire spread just to make sure that the bid/ask spread is low and narrow before the trade gets submitted to my broker. Okay? Is that pretty cool?

You can do so many different things inside of these opportunity checks. And basically, what you're doing is you're having the bot pre-screen the trade for you. Listen, you're having the bot pre-screen the trade for you. That is incredible that you can do that and notice we do that for every single different order type that we're getting into. Now really quickly, let me jump over to another bot. Okay? I'm gonna jump out of this one. I want to jump over to another bot because I think this is so so important.

Okay, here's the monthly iron condor bot, which is when I just started. It's based off of a recent podcast episode. By the way, this is connected to my main TD account. This is not paper trading. This is real trading that I'm doing with this bot. Now look here inside of the log, okay? Notice today I opened one. The bot opened one new position today, okay? The bot opened one new position today, and it was this one. This iron condor position that it got into an hour ago. It got into it at 1:30.

I wanna go here into the log. I'm gonna filter. Just look at all my scanners, okay? Now, look at one o'clock. Now, this is before- pay attention here for a second. This is before the bot got into the position. I'm gonna open my scanner, which just shows the exact decisions, right? Just like that test that we ran, and I'm gonna go to TLT, which is the position that it did get into later in the day.

So I was having the bot asked a bunch of questions, go through some decisions, right? And now look at this opportunity filtering that I did down at the bottom. I had a bunch of opportunity filters. Does the potential iron condor pass my opportunity filters? And I was checking liquidity, rate of return, and probability of success. Now when I click on this, you'll see that it failed at the first opportunity filter. At that time during the day, the bid/ask spread was 22 cents wide, which was wider than I was willing to accept. I didn't want to get into a position if the bid/ask spread was too wide.

So do you see how the bot did that earlier in the day? Now at 1:30, which is when the trade actually went through, if I got over to TLT. Now, look at what the bot did as far as logic. At that moment and time, the bid/ask spread came in and was 18 cents. The probability of profit was 67%, which was over my threshold, and the rate of return was above my threshold that I was willing to accept. So everything checked out. Boom. Order gets fired to my broker. I'm into a trade.

Now, this is the power of using scanner automations to do this type of stuff. Because earlier in the day, all morning basically, the spreads were too wide, the probabilities weren't there, you weren't getting paid enough money, and for whatever reason, whatever happened, you eventually had everything line up for you, right? At some point during the day or during the week or whatever, you're gonna have things line up for you. So, again, we can go to like the morning. Like 11:45 this morning. Right? You go to TLT like what was lining up? See, the spreads were just too wide, but I don't know when the spreads are gonna be narrow. I don't know if it's gonna be in the morning, or the afternoon, or whatever, like you don't know when those things are gonna happen. So you just let the bot make those decisions for you.

So here's another one, GLD, right? Could have I gotten into GLD? Well, the spread was narrow enough this morning, but the probability of profit not there. Not there yet. So we don't have a position right. You're not getting into another position in GLD because something checked out, but not all things. This thing, to me, is so powerful. It's so powerful that it's checking as you go like this. Because you don't know when it's gonna line up like I don't know when it's gonna line up, let the bot do all of those checks.

And this is the beauty of using scanners is when you use scanners like this and you have the bot do all these checks for you, it's checking all of these things at the same time. Now here's another one in here. Okay, this one is the cherry picker. I like the cherry picker. Cherry picker one is a good one. Again, this is a real bot that I'm running after I made the template. Real bot that I have in here. Inside the log, and I go to my scanners, and I can just filter by my scanners, right? I'm looking for cherry-picking opportunities. That's what I'm looking for, right?

And so I go here, and I loop through the different symbols that I have like USO, right? Is the bid/ask spread tie? Yes. Do I have enough available capital? Yes. Is liquidity good? Yes. Okay, that's good, right? Is there cherry-picking opportunity for this? Nope, RSI is not high enough. So let the bot do all of these different decisions for you in order to try to filter and find that opportunities.

So going back to the honey badger now. If I go to my automations, you'll notice that inside of this particular automation, I have all of these inputs that I created. These are called custom inputs, and just like the ticker value, I can create a custom input for any variable or value inside of the platform. So let me show you how this works. So here, inside of this recipe for the high RSI value. Notice I've already connected it to a ticker, and over here, I created a new input called high RSI level. Now look, here's what would happen. Follow along closely with me on this.

If I disconnect this, I could easily type in RSI has to be above 80, right? And I can save this, and that's fine. It would always check 80 every single time for every single ticker, and if that's what you wanna use, you are more than welcome to do that. But if you ever want to change that value, you do have to come back in here and change that value, which make sense, right? Come in here, and if I don't want to use 80 anymore, I wanna use 75. I'm gonna change that value to 75, and then I'm gonna save.

So instead of doing that, if you don't want to and some people do. Instead of doing that, we give you the ability to create a custom input for this field. And what that does is it allows you to make a flexible variable field for that input. So when you create a custom input, you just, instead of typing in the value, you just create a custom input. Notice we already had created one, but you can just add one, right? That's how you make one. You type it out, bla bla bla. Now you have your custom input, and notice we've got a couple different custom inputs, and this particular one is called high RSI level.

So now it's checking this, which is a custom input for us which means it's flexible to edit and modify this as we go. Do you guys want to see how we do this? So I'm gonna save out of here and then right here, this little eye icon right here is where I can edit and modify any of these variables. So this particular scanner is running these custom inputs. My ticker, my high RSI level, my high CCI level, all of these different things. This is what this scanner is using. So if I wanna change the RSI reading, I just change it right here to 80. Boom. Done and saved.

And if I wanna add another honey badger scanner for another ticker, I can actually do that really simply. I can just add another. Notice what I did here, right? This particular honey badger is running on one ticker. It's very customized to SPY. Maybe you wanna run yours like that. So if I wanna add another one, I just click on the plus icon, go to my dropdown list. I'm gonna add another honey badger scanner, and this time I'm gonna change some of these variables.

So instead of SPY, I'm gonna do GLD. I want GLD to be 90 and 125. I want the low readings to be 20 and -125. Notice I'm reusing the exact same automation, but this time the automation is just referencing different input values for GLD. Same automation, same setups, same sets of decisions, but using different input values. Maybe the minimum open interest now for GLD is 100. The bid/ask spread I'm willing to accept is 10 cents. I want the return hurdle to be 35% and the iron condor return to be 25% and good to go, right? And then I hit save.

And now I've got two honey badgers running, but notice this one is using this set of criteria. And this one is using this set of criteria. Same scanner, same automation, but different inputs are being used across the different setups that we have. So that's how you can create some pretty cool stuff. You can create reusable automations that are super, super flexible. This is why I tell people all the time like no two stocks are exactly the like.

Okay, I wanna keep going and show you guys some really cool ideas on things you can do, okay? So I'm gonna go over here to bots, and I'm gonna go over to, let's do this one. Let's do the flash crash or the flash hedge bot, which we did a massive, massive training on a couple weeks ago. So if you don't have a chance to watch that, please go back and watch that. It's a really cool one.

Okay, so this one is a little bit different than the honey badger. Remember, the honey badger was one scanner that could enter multiple positions, right? Do you guys remember that? Could do a call spread, a put spread, iron condor, whatever. This one is just purely set up differently. It doesn't mean it's better or worse or whatever. It's just set up differently to show you different example.

This time I have a scanner for every type of position that I want to get into. Instead of having one scanner that goes into a bunch of different branches, this time just because it's easier this time, it's a partition out each individual strategy that I want it to run. So I have a short call spread entry. I have a long put hedge. I have a short put spread and an iron condor. And they all have different criteria, but they all can run a scanner because I could enter any or all of them at different times.

So, in this case, I have a call spread entry, right? And it has this set of criteria, right? So is the market in an uptrend? Bla bla bla. Does it pass all my filters, right? So I have the same opportunity filters as before, and I could open these two different types of short call spreads. Ultimately this scanner is gonna open a call spread at some point, right?

Then I have another one, which is my short put spread. So this is a different set of criteria to ultimately get to a short put spread. The market decrease by 4%, so I'm looking for an intraday bounce after a massive decline in the market. I wanna make sure I don't already have a put spread. Does it pass all my opportunity filters? Does this look familiar, right? Bid/ask spread less than 30 cents. Is it available? Do I have capital? Etc. etc., boom, open a short put spread. Or if I wanted to open an iron condor, is the market time after two o'clock and the market is down and I don't have any positions, and it passes all my opportunity filters, again, same thing as before. Then I wanna open an iron condor.

So again, in this case, I didn't choose to put them all together into one scanner. I decided to open them up and partition them out a little bit to each individual set of scanners that I could run. Multiple scanners can be the same bot. Yeah, you can run multiple scanners inside of your bot. Remember, a scanner is just a way to enter positions. It depends on how you wanna organize your bots and automations, but you could have a scanner that is your SPY, or you could have a bot that's your SPY bot, and then all kinds of scanners geared towards trading SPY.

So we create a bot. We'll call it the SPY bot, right? So everything we do here is geared around trading SPY. We don't care what we do in it. So we go to our automation, we'll go to our scanners, we can go to our library of scanners that we've saved before, okay? So I wanna do a Bollinger Band scanner. Great. I wanna do a Bollinger Band scanner. Save that, add that in there. I'm gonna do another one. Let's go to my library here. CCI, yeah, let's do that for SPY too. Great. I wanna trade CCI too. I don't care what ultimately creates an opportunity for me. I can just put these all in here for that particular symbol. I wanna do a honey badger scanner. Great, I do a honey badger.

Do you notice how like that you can add multiple types of scanners? They could be all geared around the same thing. RSI? Great. I wanna do an RSI potential too. Right? Like, I don't care how the bot gets into a position. Multiple different ways. You can check Bollinger Band, CCI. You can do the honey badger, RSI. You could do multiple strategies for this one; the RSI bot, all geared on SPY. You don't have to do that, but you could if you wanted to.

Okay, let me show you a couple cool things which you can do with scanners which I don't think a lot of people do. Okay? I don't think a lot of people do stuff like this, so let me show you when I build out this thing called a demo scanner here real quick because I just wanna show you one cool thing that you could do. One cool thing that you can do. Let me just get rid of all of these ones that we have here. I'm just gonna delete all the ones that we have that we built out here earlier today together.

Okay, one thing that you could do is you don't have to start with the symbol loop. Now, this is actually pretty interesting. So follow me along here on this because I think this is pretty interesting. You don't have to start with a symbol loop. I noticed that a lot of people start with a symbol loop inside of their automations, but you don't have to start that way if you wanted to. You could put more into your scanner automations if you know what logic would trade these symbols vs. those symbols, okay?

So let's say you have a decision that you start with. So you start every scanner with a decision to just check the VIX level. So if the VIX is above 25, then you're in a high volatility regime, right? So the market is crazy, crazy high, and the VIX is high, so maybe you wanna trade other things vs. other things if the volatility is low, okay? I don't care what that is. It doesn't matter. It could be something for you.

If the VIX is above 25, you could add a symbol loop here that trades more high volatility stuff, maybe stuff like, I don't know, Tesla, Apple, right? Netflix, whatever, okay? AMD. Whatever you want, okay? You trade like some really high-tech names when volatility is high. Like you want the bot to automatically shift to trading other things vs. something else. So you add a bunch of these here when volatility is high, and then you save.

If the VIX is not above 25 and it's low, you can actually add multiple symbol loops to your bot. So when the VIX is low, you might wanna trade then good old standard vanilla plain back at the envelope normal ETFs. And then you add those to your symbol loop. So now, inside of your automation, you're basically allowing the bot to determine, right? Based on what you put in, which symbols for that particular day it's going to start scanning, right? Like which ones does it gonna start targeting. Is it gonna target these ones or these ones? Right?

And you can do even more decisions in between here. You could say, alright, I'm gonna proceed this decision with another one that says that the S&P's price is above or below its long-term moving average, right? Are we in a downtrend, or are we in an uptrend? Right? And then you could start branching it off of here, so like, no, we're not in here. Great, add another symbol loop over here, and this time I want you to do these ones, XRT. I want you to do XLF, and I want you to do Facebook, I don't know. Whatever you want, okay?

And then you add those here. So notice you can have multiple symbol loops inside of your scanners, and you can just let the bot determine under what environment do you wanna trade some tickers vs. others. This is the question I always ask people, by the way. So a lot of people come, and they say, Kirk, I just wanna trade everything. I wanna scan everything. And I'm like, well, one, you really don't want to scan everything because some things in the S&P 500 are like thousands of dollars per share, right? So do you really wanna scan everything, or maybe not. And they're like, well, anything under 500. I'm like, okay, check and see if some stock prices that are over 500 go down this path, under 500 go down that path. There you go. You've already started to split and part your C, right?

Do you wanna trade tech exactly the same as like IWM and SPY? No, right? If you're trading Tesla, which is obviously more volatile, you might wanna trade that a little bit differently, right? Than if you trade SPY or GLD or some of these other ones. So this is a really cool way to do it where you can partition and split your scanner automation down different paths based on the market environment at the time. So VIX is below 25, right? So if the market is in an uptrend, you could have another VIX decision here, too, right? So you can split this here, and you can say, okay, I wanna precede this. I think I know where you are going with this, Larry.

Yeah, you could just have another VIX decision here, and you could say, okay, if the market is in the downtrend and the VIX is above 25, then I wanna do these tickers vs. if the market is in a downtrend and the VIX is not above 25 then I wanna do Y tickers, whatever they are. And you just put them in, and then there you go. Then the bot will automatically adjust as it goes what tickers it's trading. I don't think that's the end all be all; I'm just trying to show you guys different ideas on what you could do with it.

All right, here's another way you could do it. I wanna show you one more additional way. I'm gonna go over here to one of our other bots, which is Genesis 3. Let me go to Genesis 3. I'm gonna clone this. I'm gonna go hit and clone it. Skip by that because I wanna jump into it. But this is a really, really cool way to do it, okay? So one of the ways that we do in this Genesis 3.0 bot, which by the way, we've got a video that walks through all of this like step by step, and I kinda walked through the building of it, right?

But one of the things that we do this time with our scanner in Genesis is when I open up the scanner, you can see that the bot checks first for a tag on itself called scanners enabled. So follow me on this for a second. What the scanner is doing is before it does anything before it gets to the point of looping through a bunch of tickers. It's checking to see if it's allowed to scan. That's pretty cool because what we did this time is we used a tag during the market open to see if the markets are going crazy that day. And if the markets are going crazy that day, we disabled automatically all of our scanners.

Okay, so let me show you how we do this. It's wicked cool. Definitely advanced. This is not like a newbie thing, but you can get to it pretty quickly. Okay? And certainly can go and clone this and look at it with this template. So every morning, every day at 9:45, right after the market opens, I run one automation. And the automation is just purely checking where the VIX is every day on this bot. If the VIX is really, really high, I add a tag to the bot called scanners disabled, right? So the bot is basically tagging itself as it goes. I add a tag to the bot called scanners disabled. And if volatility is low, I untag scanners disabled, and I retag scanners enabled, right? And I even gave you a little caption like market's looking calm, great, give your bot a green light to start scanning.

So now, what your bot can do is your bot can intelligently turn off scanners and automations even if it has the ability to get into a new position. So that it stops it from opening trades, maybe if you don't wanna trade during high volatility. Alright, so now what I did here is that if volatility is high, I untag the bot scanners enabled, I tag the bot scanners disabled, and I send myself a notification saying market volatility is too high today for new positions. I've disabled scanners today. I'll check again tomorrow. Love, your bot. I don't know. I do this personally. I think my bot talks to me, so I just have them talk to me and the things.

So now what happens is that during the day, as this thing is running, every day, it's gonna retag itself based on the market environment, which will either allow it to start entering new positions or not. It's gonna allow it to start entering new positions or not, and then it can go down the path of looping through tickers, checking all the things, right? Going through all the probability liquidity filtering. It can do all of that. But it will only do that after certain tags are enabled.

So it's a really cool way that you can use bots to be stateful, I guess you could say, is the right word, like be state aware of different environments without you having to be there and interacting with them. So let's do one more. Let's do the covered call synthetic, but if you go to covered call synthetic, you have two different scanners which are keying off of one another. They're basically like listening to one another.

The first one that you have is you have your stock entry. So the bot is checking to make sure it doesn't already have a stock position, and it checks some technical, and then it opens some long stock. That's it, right? Just your regular basic stock entry. Then you have another scanner right behind it, which is looking to make sure that the bot doesn't have a short call spread and already has a long equity position.

So it's kind of like the scanners are working in conjunction with one another. No, they're not directly connected to one another, but they're using the bot decisions to work off of one another like I have a long equity position, but I don't yet have a short call spread position, so I wanna go through the process of opening a short call spread position. Right? So that's another one where you can run two scanners inside of the same bot. one that's using some of the criteria and results of another scanner to basically create the decisions and logic for the additional one.

So the last thing I wanna show you guys really quick is I want to show you saving scanners and automations because I don't think I showed you this, and it's really important.

When you go into any of your bots and automations, in fact, you could go into any template that's already shared in the community. So, in this case, there's a lot of templates that have been shared, right? So here's one by Randy, who's in here now. This is a cool template, by the way. You guys gotta clone more of this. This one is a really cool one with like scaling in and scaling out of positions. He does like tranches of different positions; multiple positions stacked one by one behind each other. Super, super cool, okay? Let's say I love this and I want it, which I do, and I already created a clone of it.

But let's say I want it again. I can go in, and I can clone this bot, right? I can go and clone it, and I'm gonna go view the bot. Now inside of the automations tab, if I love this scanner and I wanna keep it forever, I can open it up, and I can go right up here to the folder, and I can say add it to my library. Now think about how crazy this is. This was built out by somebody else. I did not build this out. You might edit it and modify it, and that's good. That's all yours. You're not gonna interfere with anybody else's bot. This is yours now. But I can save this to my library, and I can save it to a folder called Kirk's scanners.

Now, this bot is available, or this automation is available to me in my library. So once I'm done, I just get out of here and let's say I love the way he scans, but I don't like the way he does his monitoring for some reason. Okay? I can build a new bot and reuse this component, and I can swap this out for something else in my library. So I like this, but I want to use my own monitor automation that I've already built, just like you could use your own scanner.

I wanna use this one. My 50% put spread manager. Notice how I swap one for another just by using the ability to save and reuse automation from a library. So not only did I basically import Randy's idea and his way of scanning and saved it for all eternity in my library, but I also can now mix and match different automations from different bots and templates that people have to create my own version. If I wanted to, maybe I like this, and I just wanna add another scanner to it. Again, you can just add another scanner from your library that you've already saved, maybe our honey badger, right? And we add that to this particular bot. Now, this bot has two scanners.

Do you see how it's just like literally a limitless possibility of combinations you can put together. We covered a lot, by the way, like a crazy, crazy amount in this time period together. I know we move a little bit fast, but I wanted you to see how much you could do with scanners. The scanners are; literally, they're such a great tool for traders because not only do they force you to make, you know, like script out your decisions and decide how you wanna trade. But they're so flexible to be maneuvering between different types of trades or different types of strategies. It's really, really fun to see them go together.

And this is what I encourage you to do, like go through some of the sample templates. We built this out just to kinda show you some of the samples of how you can put things together. And then, from there, you can start exploring the community of templates like these are the ones that are recently added. These are the most popular with the most clones and go through those. As traders and investors, our time is more valuable spent analyzing different strategies as opposed to execute each strategies.

Okay, hopefully, this was super, super helpful for you guys today. It's crazy like we had an awesome group today. I think it was really, really valuable and helpful. I hope you guys got a lot out of it here today. If you guys have any other follow-up questions, you can always shoot us up team@optionalpha or post in the community, another great place to get a bunch of resources and ideas. We have an amazing community. Be a person in that community who helps out other trades as well. So if you see someone with a question, offer an idea, share template, share an automation with them because maybe when you need help, right? They would do the same thing back to you.

So we definitely wanna be givers, and then we will receive after that. That's how it works, right? Anyway, hopefully, you guys had an awesome experience on this workshop with us today. Thank you so much for spending your time with us. We know your time is valuable. I don't take that lightly at all. So have a great rest of your Thursday. If you need anything at all, let us know team@optionalpha. And until next time, happy trading. Take care.