- Run a dynamic, intelligent options strategy across 100 tickers.
- Take an existing bot template and leverage bot-level inputs for speed and flexibility.
- Reuse automations throughout your portfolio so any future modifications and changes automatically update everywhere.
- Use symbol loops to create a watchlist of tickers.
- Highlight the importance of bot portfolio architecture.
Transcript
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.
So on today's bot workshop, we're going to be building a 100 ticker strategy with reusable automations and a lot of bot templates and bot level inputs. You're going to love it. I promise you'll get a lot out of this today, and again, if you're joining here live, I'm telling you this is your opportunity to really level up your trading. I'm going to challenge a lot of things. I'm going to make you think critically about this. It's all, I think, for your betterment in trading. I think you're going to love it, okay?
So here's the overview of what we're going to do today strategy-wise. So in this workshop, we're going to run a dynamic, intelligent options trading strategy across 100 tickers. I deliberately use those words because that's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to run a non-dynamic, unintelligent options trading strategy. We're trying to run a dynamic, flexible, intelligent options trading strategy across 100 tickers.
We're going to take an existing bot template and show you how to create and leverage bot level inputs for speed and flexibility. And then we're going to reuse the exact same automation throughout the portfolio so that any future modifications and changes are updated everywhere at once. This is, I think, the holy grail of what you guys want to do with trading. One of thought process went into doing this in the structure and architecture of how we put this together. So we're going to focus on that first and then get into it, okay?
We're going to talk about and highlight the importance of bot portfolio architecture. I'm going to kinda give you a framework and a model that you can start to work with. Again, the model is not do this exact thing, right? So we know we're all clear on that, right? It's not do this exact thing. It's a model you can use and a framework that you can start thinking about. Okay?
This, for sure, is a version of a question that we get all the time, or comment, or something like that that people chime in there. And anyone who's on our support team, you guys, can chime in here and like, yes, people say that all the time or some version of this, right? So we get somebody who says I want to scan the entire S&P 500 and trade iron condors on the best opportunities, right? That's what the comment say. And we say, hey, how can we help? We're Option Alpha. Nice to meet you. They're like, I want to scan the whole thing and trade iron condors in the best opportunities.
Okay, that sounds really good on the outside. Believe me. I get it. I get the main objective. I get the overarching goal. You want to look for a lot of things, and you want to trade the best stuff. I get it because I want to do the same thing, right? But here's one quick perspective that totally breaks this argument and snaps it in half. And why we have to go with a different model than just scan everything out there possible and just trade the best things.
NVR is a ticker that is in the S&P 500 has no options. So immediately, it can't scan whole entire S&P 500 because now, if I told you, well, there's a ticker in there or some other tickers in there that don't even have options. Do you want to scan those, and somebody would say, well, no, I don't, right? You know, like, I want to trade options, so if it doesn't have options, then I don't want to trade options. But then, somebody else might come along, and they'll say, well, that's okay, I can trade the stock. Maybe I just want to trade the stock.
Well, NVR is also around $4,700 per share. It's actually more expensive per share than things like Microsoft, or Amazon, or Netflix. It's a wicked expensive stock. So do you really want to trade NVR? NVR is the ticker symbol, by the way. It's Northern Virginia, NVR home, or something like that. It's a home door.
So do you really want to trade one share per stock? Probably not, right? Like, even if you have a relatively, you know, small portfolio or even a relatively bog portfolio of $4,700 per share stock is probably not what you want to do, right? Probably not what you want to do.
So that starts to break down the argument, and now immediately we start thinking to ourselves, okay, well, what do I want to trade and what do I not want to trade? If I just come in and I just want to scan everything possible, is that really the best approach? Is that the smartest, most intelligent way that we can possibly trade? So here's another way to look at it too. Amazon is a $3,000 price security. Ford, which is F, ticker symbol F, is roughly $17 as a stock price. Those have wildly different profiles.
Amazon obviously is a high volatility TACK stock, right? Where it's going to move a lot, options are going to be price and probably increments of $5, $10, or $15 wide spreads. Ford, on the other hand, is probably going to have $1 and $0.5 increments. So, again, immediately, you have this distinction that starts to get drawn. You can scan the entire S&P 500 if you want to, but do you really want to trade everything exactly the same? Does that make sense?
And by the way, if you haven't been to webinar before or demo or workshop. I say, does that make sense all the time? It's just what I do, and hopefully, make sense makes dollars within. Okay? So now you start to get it. If you want to trade Amazon, you probably are going to do something a little bit different, right? You might not even be able to do $1 wide spreads. You might not even be able to do one contract, right? Like you have to do something different compared to Ford. And again, these are both in the S&P 500.
So we're starting to break this down, this argument that, or this logic that people have to just come in and scan everything possible and just do everything in one sight, one mega bot. Okay? So here's how we think about an inefficient bot portfolio. And again, this is just a model of framework and how you can – you can extrapolate this a million times in different directions, but this is what I thought, you know, a kind of release and back and looking at this, and thinking about this for you all for last couple of days. How can we put this together, so it makes logical sense?
This is what a lot of people want to do. They want to come in, and they want to throw a bunch of ticker symbols into a $10,000 portfolio. Right? That's what they want to do. So they want to put all of these into one single bot. The green circle is what represents a bot, right? So they want to throw all these tickers into one single bot, and they want to say, bot, just scan everything, do everything, do all of this in one simple bot. Well, that seems like an easy path to go down, and it seems like the most logical path at first, to go down. It's highly, highly inefficient.
I would say it's actually borderline dangerous to your portfolio to do that. Cause look at the tickers that are in here. We just put a bunch of these and then, you know, just add 69 more if you want to do 100 tickers even at that, right? So why is this portfolio inefficient?
Well, once it assumes that all the ticker properties, the industry, the sector, the price, the volatility are all similar. Immediately, that's a bad assumption. Those are wildly different things. We even saw the difference between Amazon and Ford, which are in the S&P 500 are wildly different, can be very, very different. Especially for trading options on.
Number two, it forces the entire portfolio to allocate capital exactly the same. This is highly dangerous. You're allocating capital exactly the same level across every different type of security underlying industry out there. That's not a good recipe for trading. It's probably a lot of things you could do to improve that, right?
Number three, it disregards the flexibility you'll need to make changes because any changes that you would have to make impact all tickers. So think about this, inside of your mega, mega, mega portfolio, just everything that you want to scan. Now, if you need a mega change, that changes now reflected across everything, right? That change is reflected across every single ticker symbol and every single decision. You have no flexibility when you build such massive convoluted thing instead of breaking it down a little bit more.
The last thing that it does in wide inefficient is because it clouds visibility into performance. When you have this blob of trades in your portfolio, and we hear this all the time. Like that's why we're building out a journal software, so you can get some more clarity into some of these. But bots help you do this by breaking it up anyway, but when you blob everything together into one massive convoluted pie of trading, you really don't know where your performance is coming from.
You don't know what's hurting. You don't know what's helping. You just know that summation of everything is either working or not working. So here's the idea, right? You have this inefficient portfolio and what we have is actually, if you break up the actual components, you probably have some micro portfolio stuck inside of this portfolio that you've been trying to build.
So you're trying to build this portfolio; it's inefficient cause you're throwing everything in one bot with $10,000. But if you put together the components and you highlight the components, you probably have some pretty interesting stuff inside of these components.
For example, in the red highlighted tickers, you have all stocks that are high-priced, TACK-oriented stocks. So those you could highlight, you put it in red. Then you have some high-priced stocks that are not necessarily TACK-focused, but you could again put them into a different basket like Goldman Sachs and Mastercard. Those are high priced, so they probably have some higher valued options. You might have to deal with those a little bit differently. Those are going to different basket.
You have SPY, QQQ, and DIA, which are all high-priced, ETFs and index focus ETFs as well. Then you have another basket of ETFs like UNG, GDX, EWZ, SLV, UNG. Those are lower-priced ETF, but they are ETF. So maybe they go into a different basket. Low price ETFs that, you know, are also ETF, I guess. I said that already, right?
Then you have some lower-priced stocks, right? That probably wouldn't fit in a high-priced TACK stock category. You might deal with those a little bit different, so you put GoPro, Ford, American Airlines, Under Amor, Twitter in a different category. So if you're watching this now, is it starting to click a little bit? Or do you already do this? If you already do this, you can say, like I already do this. This is no brainer to me, right?
But if it's new to you, then it's starting to click that you are grouping and associating different things together that you would manage or scan for differently. Right? They don't have to be similar industry, though you can, but it's how you would manage or how the properties of those different things would be similar, right? That's what you're really looking for. Like Apple, and Tesla, and Microsoft, and Amazon, and Netflix. Those are really high price security, so they're not likely to have $1 wide spreads. They're not likely, right, to have low volatility. They're likely to have a lot of volatility. So you want to break it up a little bit different. Okay?
So here's maybe a model of how you break that up. So you take this massive blob portfolio and break it up into efficient bot portfolio. So now each circle represents a bot, and what you can do here is you can take your $10,000 that you're allocated, and you can break it up into these micro portfolios. You can take Apple and Tesla, Microsoft and Amazon, Netflix and Adobe and put it into its own bot portfolio. All still running the same strategy, but you adjust, and you dynamically change a couple things in that strategy using the same bot, using the same automations, by the way. Okay?
So, by the way, we're going to be building out all of these here today on the workshop, and we're going to be using the same bot and the same automations. Not changing anything in the automations, but just using inputs to micro make adjustments to the same automation as we go so that it's flexible across these different microbot portfolios.
So now you have your $10,000 spread out. You have $2,000 allocated to your TACK stock portfolio. You have $4,000 allocated to your higher price, larger, more liquid, right? So they get more allocation to your DIA, QQQ, SPY, etc. So you get your larger allocation to a more liquid ETF-based portfolio, then you do a small, small, small allocation to this low price, not as liquid ticker symbols, maybe if you want to. These are just ideas. Okay, so, you do a lower allocation like $1,000 to that portfolio, and then finally you do maybe, say, a $3,000 allocation to UNG, EWZ, GDX, right? They're not the high flyer DIA, Q's, and SPYs, but they probably get a decent chunk of your allocation cause their ETFs are pretty liquid, okay?
So each of these green circles then represents a bot. And how you would put together that bot and how you would split it out. Now you can start to see some of benefits of doing it this way. So here some of the reasons why I think this portfolio is more efficient.
Number one, it combines similar tickers by importing characteristics. Size, industry, volatility that you might use for scanning your management. Again, this is all for you. How do you want to break up your portfolio? You can combine them, and I would, by ETF vs. stocks and then break it out from there. Higher price ETFs vs. lower price, higher-priced stocks vs. lower-priced, TACK stocks vs. non TACK, right? Like that. You can start to differentiate how you break out your bot portfolio.
Number two, you have the power to modify parts of the portfolio on the fly without impacting other areas that don't need to be adjusted. I can tell you how important that is for your trading. You now have, by breaking this out more, you have the ability to modify a micro portfolio without touching the other stuff, and that's important. So that it doesn't interfere with it. If something is working, don't touch it. Make modifications to the stuff that maybe you need to adjust.
Number three, it allocates capital efficiently. Possibly to higher/lower volatility segments which is how I might think about allocating capital. What I've done with some of my bots is I've thought about taking the bot that has a really crazy obnoxious, you know, like, I don't know. Maybe risky strategy and allocating a very, very, very small percentage of it. Maybe some people having success, so we can say, okay, look, am going to allocate like 1,000 bucks to that, right? But the core of the portfolio is something else. If I try to fit it all into one bot, that probably are going to be too convoluted and complicated to do.
Number four, it enables clear visibility of performance. When you have all of your bots broken up into little micro portfolios and strategies, you can selectively turn them off. You can say, all right, the TACK stock stuff is doing great. Keep that on. The high-priced ETF, those are doing great, but that low priced stock portfolio of Twitter, you know, Ford and Under Armour, that thing is terrible. So turn that off, or make adjustments, do it on the fly. You can see where your performance is coming from. What's helping and what's not helping potentially as you go.
The last thing is it offers "bolt-on" automation opportunities in a highly targeted manner. What do I mean by this? Well, if you're trading a portfolio of high-flying TACK stocks, you might want to bolt on another management automation that allows you to take profits before the weekend, right? That might be a one-off case where you add an automation that checks for a profit before the weekend on Friday and removes any positions before the weekend with the profit, right? That can be bolted on, added immediately to an automation inside that bot portfolio without interfering with the other bots that are running.
So by breaking up your bots into these strategies, strategy-based bots and highly targeted with different tickers, you have the ability to selectively bolt-on automations to those strategies, again, without interfering with the core strategy that you're running.
All right, so here's what we got. So what we're going to do is we're going to do the high IV rank Iron Condors, which means we're going to ignore this reactive EMA debit spreads that I put together and painstakingly put together for you because I thought some of you would do that. We're going to focus on this one.
So inside of this bot template. By the way, this is a bot template that's been shared. It's in your template library. You can use this one. So this one is already there. You don't have to recreate this. This is not a brand-new one. We're literally taking an existing bot template that you have access to in your library of sample templates and using it as the basis for this workshop. So it's there for you. You don't have to recreate it. You don't have to know where it is. Okay? And same thing with the debit spread. The debit spread one is in your library. It's in the sample templates, so you can have that there. Okay?
Here's what I want to share you guys how to do. Inside of this bot template, and follow me as I do this, okay? I'm going to go up to the settings here, and I want to show you that this bot currently does not have any bot level automations. So bot level or bot level inputs. So this bot does not have any bot level inputs currently. You'll notice that down here below the position limits. This is where your bot level inputs live inside of a bot. And we don't have none of them right now. We're going to create them.
Inside of the automations, this bot has two automations that it runs. And we are going to reuse this automations throughout the portfolio that we're going to build of a hundred tickers, okay? We're going to reuse these automations throughout the portfolio. Once we are good to go with these automations, we are not going to change them at all as we build out this portfolio.
One automation. One scanner, one monitor automation throughout the whole portfolio. Good to go?
So this scanner automation here. If we click on this, we're just kinda walk through what it does, just at a high level. Again, we build this out in another video or somewhere in the platform, okay? We built this thing out so you can see what it does, but we're going to be looping through a set of ticker symbols. Checking to see if the bot can open a new position. Checking to see if that ticker symbol that it's currently looping through is above our minimum IV rank threshold. Then check in to see if the bots already have an existing position that's an iron condor that symbol, so we're not overlapping positions. We just want to run one iron condor at a time. Okay? We just want to run one iron condor at a time.
Then we're going to check and see if the bots have enough capital to open a new position. So does the bot have enough money? Like, there's definitely a position there. It's not overlapping, right? Like these are all the normal questions you can have your bot asked. Does the opportunity have a narrow bid/ask spread? Again, very simple question filter that you can ask the bot to go through. If you don't know what an opportunity filter is, if you've never done this before, then go and watch the last workshop that we did on the 45-days sequential iron condor or iron butterfly strategy. We spent an insane amount of time going through opportunity filters and really dug in on the last workshop, okay?
So you're going to ask the bot, do I have enough capital? Is there narrow bid/ask spread? Okay, fine, open an iron condor position, okay? Now throughout all of these decisions that we have, we have created inputs for some of these fields that are variable, like IVR threshold. So inside of our decision recipe for this recipe to check and see if the symbols IV rank is above some minimum value. Instead of just typing in that value all the time and using, say, 70 across the entire bot portfolio, instead what we did is we created a custom input.
That custom input is now flexible so that we can modify that input whenever we use this automation. So we just connected it to this custom input that we created called IVR threshold, and then we click save. Okay? So we've got a number of custom inputs that this bot automation is using. It's got all these custom inputs on the left-hand side. We just simply click on the row to get to the scanner, right? Here's our scanner inside of our automations tab to get to the automation editor. We just are now simple looking at the automations that we're running, okay?
Inside of our monitor automation, though, now remember, our bot is basically like two components, and this is how I think about bots. You got everything that you're going to do to define and enter positions and everything that you're going to do to manage your positions. This bot has a monitor that includes three different ways it could exit. So in this case, it's got profit target, it's got an expiration threshold, and it's a got cool switch called close if challenged.
So let's run through these monitor automations really quick, so you can see how it works. It's going to repeat through every iron condor position that the bot opens. It's going to check and see if the premium on that iron condor decreased by our profit target. Remember, with iron condors; we want the values of the premium, the position to go down. So when the value goes down, we're going to take a profit and close it, right? Whenever our profit target it is. Notice that we're using a custom input here because we could modify that profit target as we go.
Then it's going to ask if this switch called close if challenged is on. This allows us to dynamically control an entire portion of our automation, and we can allow the bot to close the position if the short strike or put strike is being challenged. Do you all do this, by the way? Do you close your iron condors immediately if the short strike is challenged? If you do, turn the switch on. If you don't turn the switch off.
If you close this template, turn that switch on, and it would immediately close the position if the short strike is challenged. If you don't, you turn your switch off. The bot doesn't close whenever the position is challenged, only closes it when it gets close to expiration. So switch is a crazy cool, powerful feature that allows you to, again, micro control certain portions of your automation.
So once we have our monitor automation all set up, and again, remember we're using some custom inputs here for profit targets, closing it for a near expiration, and if we want to close a challenge. It's not an overly complicated strategy. It's run very nicely with the bots, okay? Couple little moving pieces that we can have in there.
Now what we're going to do is we're going to send all of these inputs to the bot level. I'm going to repeat. We're going to send all of these inputs and create bot level inputs out of them. So inside of this one bot that we have here, kind of our base model template here. What we're going to do is we can go over here to the inputs, and we can modify any of these inputs we want inside of our automation. These are all of our custom inputs.
I got here, by the way, by just hovering over the row of scanners. You can click on the dots and go to settings, or you can just click on the eye icon right here, and that will load up all of your custom inputs for that automation. Now, if I wanted to change these custom inputs, I could change it from 70 as a minimum to 50. And then what I can do is just simply hit save. Now those new custom inputs are saved. And if I want to go back and change them, I can just change them right here. And that's totally fine, and that's okay. But these are automation level inputs. The inputs are at the automation level. I know I say it a lot, but does that make sense? The inputs are at the automation level.
So what do I want to do instead is I want to send them to the bot level? I want to control everything. Not inside of the individual automations, but I want to control everything here, in one screen at the bot level. What this does is this allows me to control bots without having to dig into the automations to do that, which means I can replicate bots over and over and over and over again and make micro-adjustments to them. Okay?
So here's what we're going to do first. What we're going to do is we're going to go to those inputs cause they're right now at the automation level, and we are going to click on the bottom to create another input. Okay? We're going to click on the button to create another input which is going to be at the bot level, which is this button, this little blue button to the right of there.
So what we're going to do is we're going to click a button to create a bot level input. Now we don't have any bot level input, so we're going to click the button here to add a new bot level input. The cool this is that it adds all the information and criteria right here to your screen, so it's ready to go. Makes it super easy for you to just create a bot level input using the exact same criteria that you just use.
Now, if you want to modify any of these default values, like you want to change the default IVR threshold to 50, do that right here. This is the default value that will be used when you start using your bot level inputs, okay? This is the default level value that will be used when you start using your inputs.
Oh, by the way, and this is a calcification. I know some people are asking. The template that is already inside the community, inside your library, already has these all at the bot level for you. So I already did that for you. I took those out for this workshop so I can show you how to readd them. So it's already in there in your template. You don't have to create them. They are already there. That makes it so much easier for you. It's done. In this workshop, I removed them, so I show you how I added them, and you can learn how to do that with other bots as well. Okay?
So now what we do is we make that modification here to 50 and then just simply hit save. Now you can see this value is now a custom bot level input. So I'm just going to leave this one here for now and just hit save. And then, if I go up to my bot settings here, then I can see that I now have a new input. I now have a new input which is controlled at the bot level. So any changes I make here, like 70, will now flow through to my scanner because I've now connected at the bot level.
So if I want to make any changes, I just simply go up to my settings, and I make the change here. And now, any field that's connected to that simply flows through to the rest of the bot. Super cool. So what I want to do is I want to create custom bot level inputs for all of these fields, okay? I want to create custom bot level inputs for all of these fields.
So I'm going to go down here to bid/ask spread threshold, and I'm going to create a new input for that called our bid/ask spread threshold and hit save. Position size? You betcha. going to create a new custom input. Default position size is one contract and then hit save. Ticker symbols? You betcha. I'm going to create a new custom input for this one. I'm going to give it just one symbol so I can quickly add symbols to it, right? You can just make any amount of custom symbols you want, and I'll just give it one symbol like SPY so I can add symbols to it really quickly and then again hit save.
Now all of these values here are added as now bot level inputs. So if I hit save and I go up to my settings for the bot, again, I just went up to my settings up at the top right-hand corner for the bot. Now, look at all these sweet, sweet new bot level inputs that I have.
By the way, if you want to modify or edit any of these bot level inputs, just click the edit button right here, right? And you can reorganize them. You can just sort them like I like to reorganize and sort them. You can modify any of your default values. You can delete your custom inputs here, right? You can do all of that right here inside of that screen. Once you're good to go, you just simply hit save. Okay?
So now, for this particular automation, all of those inputs are now controlled at the bot level. Now what we're going to do is we're going to do same thing for your monitor automations, okay? We're going to do same thing for your monitor automations. So you monitor automations has its own inputs like when do we take profits, when do we close if we're nearing expiration. Do we close if challenged? Remember, this is that switch that you can just turn on and turn off really simple toggle switch you can turn on and turn off.
We want to put all of these at the bot level as well, so we create a custom bot input for these. Create another custom bot input for this one as well, and create another custom bot input for this one as well. Now all of our monitor inputs are going to be controlled at the bot level. Okay? The bot level and the automation level is just the higher level of connection. It's just a higher level of connection that you can go through.
Now when I go to my settings, now you can see I've got even more inputs down here. All of my inputs that I just added for profit target, expiration, close if challenged, etc., which means this is the important point, so just listen here for a second. This means that I can control the entire bot from one very convenient screen and when I now am not going to start making new bots. I can use the same automations across those bots, but just tweak the inputs or variables that they use to now control that bot and make it highly dynamic, highly intelligent for that particular setup that I want, okay?
So once you're good to go here, you just simply save, and now you have, again, everything controlled from there. All of your inputs are now at the bot level. Now all of your control is done at the bot level, and you can visually see this because you can see it's connected to a bot level input. Okay?
All right, now we're going to start wrapping out this strategy over and over and over and over again. So the goal for us is to take this high IV rank iron condor strategy with these two automations, and now build out a massive portfolio of different ticker symbols with each of these blocks of portfolios a little but custom to how we want them managed because they should be managed maybe a little bit differently.
Now it doesn't mean we're going to change the scanner, doesn't mean we're going to change the monitor automation.
We're still using the same automation across all of these, which means that we have an insane amount of flexibility to make changes and modifications as we go. But what it does mean is it does mean it gives us a lot of flexibility to create a big nice bot portfolio, okay?
So here's what we're going to do. We're going to go up here, and we're going to—let me go to this first. We're going to create our first version of this right here, okay? We're going to create the first version of this right here. By the way, if you're a little bit lost, it's okay. Just go back and review the video. Go back through it. This is all brand new. It's a little bit more advanced than building out bots. I get it. It's a little bit more of an advanced session. That's okay. Okay?
So what we're going to do here is we're going to set up our first bot. This is going to be our base, kind of like V1 version. So it was called like version one or just call it high IV rank condors. We'll call this one our core ETFs, okay? Whatever just make sense for you.
I want to call this one core ETFs. I want to first focus on core ETF positions, okay? I'm going to go ahead and actually what I'm going to do, yep, here, is I'm going to allocate as much money as I want, say $1,000, whatever that is. I'm going to increase the position limits to 10 positions because I want to get 100 possible tickers, ten in each bot portfolio. So I'm going to do ten positions at any one time, daily ten positions in total.
Now, remember, inside of our scanner automation, I told the bot not to overlap positions. So the bot would only, only, only ever have one position in every ticker that I list. Even though I'm telling you, you can grab all ten positions today and all ten positions at any one time. It's never going to overlap positions. Super cool, right?
Now, inside of my custom inputs, I'm now going to add all the tickers that I want. So for this one, I want SPY, I want QQQ, I want DIA, I want SMH. They may notice a pattern with some of these that I'm adding. These are not only ETFs, but they're also high priced ETFs. Like the value of the underlying symbol is a high priced underlying symbol. I can look this up, by the way, in the watchlist, and you can see all of these in here. Okay, so there's my ten ticker symbols.
Once I'm good to go, I just simply hit done. So this bot now is going to loop through all of these. These are my core ETF symbol. I'm just calling this one my core ETF symbols because they're all ETFs, and they're all high priced ETFs, which is why I'm grouping them and I'm associating them together in this particular bot.
Now for high IV rank threshold, I'm going to keep it at the default value of 50. As soon as the IV rank on any of these ticker symbols is above 50, that's when I want the bot to start to think about initiating a trade. Now I say think about initiating a trade because it's also going to check and make sure the bid/ask spread threshold is lower than this amount that I set here.
Now because these are high priced, high liquidity, core ETFs, I'm going to set this bid/ask spread threshold a little bit low. I want really, really, really good pricing on these, and I want to make sure that these positions that I get into have great, low liquidity, very narrow pricing because they're likely to have these because they're all highly liquid anyway. Okay?
So now I'm just modifying just the input that the automation uses. I did not change the automation. I didn't adjust the decisions. I didn't reorder them. I'm just changing what number it's going to reference to these ten sets. Position size I'll leave it at one contract. Profit target, I want and bump this up maybe to say 75%. So because these are high value, high priced ETFs, right? Very liquid. I'm okay potentially holding them a little bit longer to 75%. -
I'm just using a bunch of examples, so you can see how this works, but you do you. Like you, if you want to do 50%, you can do 50. If you want to do 75, you can do 75. But you can see the logic that sometimes you're going to manage things a little bit different, right? Expiration threshold, I want to work these things all the way down to two market days, and I do not want to close positions if I'm challenged.
So again, this might be how you set up this particular basket of ticker symbols. These are highly liquid ETFs, large ETFs. You can take profits at 75, you can run them a little bit closer to expiration, and you don't close them if they're challenged. So this might be how I set up this particular bot. You guys agree with that or don't agree. It doesn't matter. You set up the one that you want. IVR threshold means that we won't enter an iron condor unless implied volatility rank is over that threshold. Okay? And once you're good to go, you simply hit save.
So now your high IV rank iron condors with core ETFs is the one that's set up. Once you're good to go, you just simply turn it on and let it start running. Okay, now it's going to start running through all of its stuff using all of the settings that you put together here. That's your first block of ten tickers in this 100 tickers portfolio that we're going with.
So here's what we're going to do now. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to clone this bot template. Notice what I did here. I went up to the three dots. I clicked on this, and I'm going to click clone bot. By the way, you can save this as a template. Clone it from a template and use it that way. You can just clone it directly. Either one works. Just a personal preference.
To make it faster, we're going to clone the bot. We're going to change the title of this one to other core ETFs, doesn't really matter what you call it. These are non-core, other core ETFs. We're going to keep it in the bot workshop account. This is where you can also put it in any of your trading accounts. We're going to keep the position limited 10. Keep the totals to 10. And now, this time, what we're going to do is we're going to change out all the tickers. We don't want these tickers anymore. We already have them in another bot.
So what we're going to do is we're going to add a completely different list of ticker symbols. This time we're going to do XLV, we're going to do IBB, we're going to do XOP. Add that one, FXE, IYR. I have a list like written down next to me. XLI, XBI, okay? It doesn't matter what you guys want to use. I want to build out 100 of these every single time, but I just want to show you how it works as we go. And then XRT. Okay.
So now we have another set of ten tickers. Completely different than our first set. These are not as liquid as the first set. So they're going to a different bot. They're still highly valued, highly targeted ETFs, so they're kind of non or other core ETFs that can go into this list, and then we can click done. Now we have a completely different set of tickers. You guys see that?
The IVR threshold, we might want to keep it 50. The bid/ask spread, we might want to keep it 10 cents. Position size, we might want to keep at one contract, but maybe, maybe, just maybe, we might want to adjust something like the profit target. Maybe we inch this down to 50%. It would only take profits at 50% just for these ticker symbols. Do you guys see that? So if I adjust this custom bot input here, I did make a modification to the automation. I didn't change anything in the automation at all. No decisions were changed, nothing. All I'm doing is changing the input that it's referencing.
I'm telling the bot, this particular bot, this micro portfolio bot that for these tickers which are not as liquid and not as popular as the other ones that we had in our first bot that I wanted to take profits of 50%. That's the one change I want to make. Micro dynamic, intelligent change to that bot portfolio, and I want to keep everything else the same. Maybe I keep it at expiration two market days, close if challenged is off, and I hit clone. Now I've got my new bot. This is my new bot running with the exact same automation. I can turn it on, by the way. Go up to your settings. You can see all of the settings for this new bot. It's the exact same automation that is running.
This bot also is running the same automation as the core bot, which is our first one. Exactly the same. Exactly the same automation. It just has different inputs. One is using different inputs vs. the other ones. Okay? One is using different inputs vs. the other ones, but it's using the same automation. So check this out really quick. If I make a change to this one automation, that change flows through to any bots that are using that automation. This is how you get a lot of speed and flexibility out of reusing automations across different bots.
So if I were to make a change to any of these fields here, then that change would be reflected across to the other bots that are using that automation. Notice that, again, we're not going to make any changes right now, but if I did, it would flow through to the other bots. And what you going to do, by the way, to save an automation to your library? Just go ahead and do this. You go to the button in the automation. Use add it to your library. So like, if I wanted to do this in the scanners and it's in there. I just click the button, and I save it right there to my library. That allows me when I build new bots to reference that immediately, right? Ask me when I build new bots to reference that immediately as I go, okay?
So, now inside of this bot portfolio, we have our other core ETFs that we were using, okay? We have our other core ETFs that we were using. Again, you can just save any of these automations into your library if you want to. Notice that this ran actually just recently. Actually, I put this one up in my monitors. I don't want to save it to my other one, okay? And you can go into log, and now you can see this one was run at 1:45, right? Which was just a couple minutes ago, like three minutes ago, this one was run. And because this is my other core ETF, guess what? It was running through XLV, IVB, XOP, right? Going through and seeing if any of these meet our minimum criteria, right?
Does the bot have a potentially narrow spread? Nope. Look at this. Failed on narrow spread. That's fine, that's what you want. You want the bots. You want the bots to go through and make these decisions for you. To check all these stuff for you. You want them to do that. That's okay. So automations ran, didn't make any trades. That's fine. That's what we want the bot to do. Just keep looking for us. Thank you, Mr. Bot.
So now I want to do is I want to go up, and I want to now create another bot, right? So I'm going to go here, and I'm going to clone this bot again. And now, I'm going to change this one. Let's call this one none core ETFs, okay? We have like core ETFs, other core ETFs. We're just going to call this one non-core ETFs. Whatever you want to call it doesn't really matter. I'm going to change some of the inputs here.
This time, I'm going to modify these, and I'm going to get rid of all of these other ticker symbols that were in here. And now I'm going to change it to some other ticker symbols. XLP, added in here. EFA, KRE, I mean, these are really kinda non-core in some cases. But maybe you want to search some of these. XLP, XLE, XLU. XLU, I guess, could be kinda cool. I think I did XRT, or maybe I'm off here. XLU, there we go. And XLE, right? USO. I have a list here. EWW, EEM, okay, good. So now we have these other non-core tickers that we want to add in there, right?
You guys see this? Now our IVR threshold can still be at 50. Maybe now we start inching up the bid/ask spread to say 15 cents. Because maybe at this point, what we're doing now is we're trading stuff that's really not as liquid. So we maybe want to inch up the bid/ask spread, so that maybe it's just going to find a couple of these trades a little bit sooner. Maybe we also know just a profit target to take profits earlier. Maybe for these non-core ones, we want to close if they're challenged.
So now we can just make these modifications right here to the bot level input and be on our way. And we create this new version, this new clone. Now we go here, and we create this new clone, and we can turn this on immediately. And now it's running under these parameters that we added inside of our bot level settings. Notice again, we did not make any changes to the automations themselves. Never make changes to the automations. They're still reusing the same automations that we keep cloning over and over and over again that are inside of our library.
Okay, now this time, we're going to do a different set. We're going to do ETFs, okay? So now what we're going to do is we're going to say, we'll call this high-priced stocks, okay? We call it high priced stocks. I'm just going to be a couple more, so you guys get the repetition side of it, and you can continue to do this over and over again.
So now we're going to do high priced stocks. We don't want to do ETFs, we want to do high price stocks, and we're going to do a lot of changes for this one because now we're trading stocks, we're not trading ETFs. So maybe we modify strategy. We're still using the same basic strategy, just different inputs that we want to use for the bot.
So first one that we're going to do is we're going to do ROKU. By the way, the way I created this particular list just for the bot workshop was I just went to the watchlist inside of Option Alpha. Rank all stocks by historical volatility, and I'm taking the highest volatile stock. So I should- I'll rename it to a highest volatility stocks, but you can create list however you want. You can do it by sector, or industry, or whatever you want. But these right now, just so you know, are highest historical volatility stocks inside of the watchlist that we have on Option Alpha.
We do Facebook, PayPal. That's another one. ATVI, there you go, Activision. EXC, there you go. I didn't know that one was high. Marvel, that's another one. So you can add marvel. However, you want to do it. AMD super easy one that you can do. Tesla, of course, nice high volatility stock that you can add, and Nvidia. Okay, great.
So you have your list of ten. However, you come up with it, you guys come up with it, share list in the community. By the way like, if you have a list and you like that list, share them there. And what you can do is go ahead and hit the done button.
So now you have your different tickers that you have here. And now, your IVR threshold might be a lot higher. Maybe like 80 because you know these stocks are very volatile, so you only want to grab the highest, highest, highest, IV rank possible for these stocks. So you don't want to get the medium or so volatility. You want to grab crazy high volatility. Notice we only made a change here. Also, you might want to inch up this bid/ask spread threshold because they're probably higher-priced securities. Most of them are. So you might have to have some wider spreads just to get something filled.
Your profit target, you might want to inch this down to, say, 25, or you might want to take an even bigger profit. Your expiration threshold, you might move out to, say, four days. Like close anything within four days because you definitely you don't want to get assigned on these things, and maybe there's a higher likelihood of getting assigned because they're so volatile those last couple days. And then you can choose whether you want to close the position if it's on or off. So, you just simply toggle on or off, right? So if we don't want to close, we toggle it off. If we do, we toggle it on, and we're good to go.
One simple screen, one run-through of going through this bot level inputs. Now you have one bot, an automation set that you're using over and over and over again, but you're making slight adjustments and tweaks as you go to that sets of automations through this bot inputs. And once you're good to go, you clone, right? And now we can go over and view our bot.
So now we've got all of these bots that are running. They're running a core strategy, but they're each just a little bit different, right? They each have a little bit different set of criteria for how they're being used. I'm going to change this one, as I said, high historical volatility stocks, okay? You're each choosing a little bit different set of criteria, and by the way, if you want to go in and modify any of these, just go in and modify just for that one microbot that you're running.
That's the beauty of doing this inside bot. See, if you had everything in one big fat bloated mega bot, you couldn't do this. You couldn't say, okay, for high IV stocks, I want to go in, and I want to change the IVR threshold to 75. The bid/ask spread threshold, I want to change that to 25. No, no, no, cause then it would go across the entire bot. That's a really bad way of doing it. But here, by breaking it up and using bot inputs, we can create these little micro portfolios that we can watch and manage as we go.
By the way, we can make adjustments to these portfolios. So maybe if I go back to my list, my core ETFs, so check this out. My core ETFs could get a higher capital allocation. It could get more of my capital. I could give them $3000 of capital vs. the other ones have only $1000 of capital. So now I can adjust, and I can allocate a little bit more of my total portfolio to that particular set of criteria, right? If I want to give my noncore positions, I could modify this one and give my noncore a little bit more money even still and still have the other ones have less money.
So I've got $3000 on the core, $2000 on noncore, and the rest have $1000. However, you want to break it up. So now I've started to build this thing out, and I can just keep going from here. So let me go just really quick. Let me do one more, okay? I know you guys don't want to see me do like 25 of these over and over again because it's becoming repetitious. Okay? But let me do one more.
So let me go here, and I want to do another one, and we can be like nonstandard stocks, right? Or whatever, just nonstandard stocks. Some other set of stocks criteria. And we're going to remove all these, and these ones are going to be even more- we're going to do a lot more with these ones because these are nonstandard stocks. These are lower down the list, but hey, you said you want to scan nearly the whole S&P 500. Alright, knock your socks off. So we've got CF. We can do QCOM. What else in there? BX. What's in there? XLF, Clorox, there we go, there's another one. You can do NTES. You guys do this one? I do not do this one, but you can do BIDU, right? But some people, if you want to build up this big portfolio, scan everything possible, do it this way. Just do it intelligently by filtering out some of these ones that are not so standard and core. Right?
So these are not standard. They're lower price generally. They're not a high volatility like historical volatility. You just put those in there, and then you change any of these values. So maybe the bid/ask spread threshold is 60 now. Maybe definitely widen out the bid/ask spread threshold because these are nonstandard. You change your profit target to, say, 15%. You give it only like one calendar day, and you don't close if challenged.
I don't know. Whatever you want to do. I'm just making, you know, kind of showing you different ways you could do it, and then you hit clone. And now you continue to have just another, another, another portfolio that you can build from, okay?
Now check this out. So inside of these automations. Now let's say your portfolio is running. Let's say you've got this whole great portfolio running, right? And now what you want to do is you want to filter everything. Like, check this out, right? You want to filter everything, everything, every single ticker that you're running. You want to filter it by liquidity that day, okay? Now, if you're running this normally, you'd have to remember to do this all the time, over and over and over and over again.
So now what we're going to do is because all of these automations are connected together, and they're linked between bots. I can go into this automation, and what I can do is I can filter by IV rank and do all these other decisions, but I can add another decision in this automation. Now when I add a decision here, remember, this is a saved automation that is being used throughout the other bots.
So when I make a change here, that change flows to every bot. But here's the logic of doing this, right? If you're running this, and now you start to realize maybe I want to filter everything so that I'm only trading the stocks that have some minimum liquidity, right? Some minimum threshold of liquidity, I can add that to an automation and see that globally adjust across everything. So I can go here, and I can precede this decision with a new decision, and I can add a decision here to see if the symbol volume is above some threshold that I sent.
So I can connect this to whatever symbol it's looping through, just like what we normally do. I can check some symbol properties. In this case, it's going to check the symbol's volume that day and make sure that it's greater than, I don't know. What do you guys want to do? Like 5000 shares or what else, 50,000. Doesn't matter. Whatever you want to put in there, you put in there. Symbol volume greater than 50,000 for the day.
So if the symbol volume is not greater than 50,000 for that day, the automation stops at that decision. That might be some change that you want to make. I'm just, again, using this as an example of any change that you would want to make to the automations. And once I hit save, and then add this, I'm going to add this down the yes path.
Notice that that now there's a new decision that gets grouped in here. Like it's added to my set of automations. That new change is now flowing through to other bots that are using this automation. Think about how mind-blowing this is for one second. You made a change to one automation that is now flowing through to every other bot using that automation. That's really, really powerful. That reduces time, friction, super fun, right?
So I can go up here and save, and I'm in my high IV rank iron condors. And I go to my high IV stocks bot, which is using, guess what? That same automation. So now if I go in here, viola! That same decision is now in here. Same thing would happen if I deleted it. So, say, I deleted this and say, you know what, I don't want to use this anymore. Boom! Deleted, and it's out. And now it's out of there. And now, when I save, that decision has now been removed from every other bot that's using that automation.
So if you do not want, you can just copy the automation and tweak it and fit the underline. Right. If you don't want it connected to an existing automation, you just create a new copy of. So here's what I mean by bolt-on and copies. If you're in this, say, nonstandard stocks, and you're like, you know what? I like this automation, but it doesn't really fit for this particular bot, and I want to just replace this automation. I don't want to edit this automation cause it's being used in other bots, so I want to create a new version that's based off of this.
I can just click the plus icon, go over to the automation dropdown. And I can hover over the high IVR scanner, and I can hover over this button right here, which is create a copy. Create a copy. That creates a brand-new copy. Not a new, edited version of the one you were just in, but a new copy, second version. Inside of this second version, you can do things like remove entire decision if you want to or make other edits, right? And whatever you want to do now, you add it here. And now you can see it's a brand-new version that was added to the bot. You can just replace the other version that was in there. And boom! And you replace it with a new version.
Now, again, by breaking out your bots into these micro portfolios or strategies, you can do this kinda stuff where you can make micro-adjustments as you go. Make micro-adjustments as you go. A copy is just creating another version of an automation. Cloning, cloning is for the bots. Clones an entire bot, makes an exact replica of the bot. You can also bolt-on other events and strategy.
So if in your nonstandard stocks, you want to bolt on another event that runs every day at the market open. Okay? So every day at the market open, it runs another event. You want to do it your iron condor manager or smart stocks. Right? So you want to run your regular iron condor manager, but every day before the market opens, or like after the market opens, right after that happens, then you're going to do one automation that runs your smart stop manager. Just once. Every day, right after the market opens, 10 minutes after.
You can bolt that on to that one particular bot. Now you don't have to modify every other bot to do that. Maybe it's only applicable to one bot or one strategy that you're running, or you can delete it and just remove it. Okay? So inside of here, if you go to templates, on the left-hand side, scroll pass your templates, and you can see high IV rank iron condors. Here's the first one. That's the one that we use today.
I already put everything at the bot level for you, so you just say clone. And then again, you can modify all of those fields that we had just like we did today. It's already there for you, ready to go when you hit clone. Same thing with the reactive 2 EMA debit spreads. You just simply hit clone, it's right above it, and then you can, again, make any modifications to bot level inputs.
You see why I use bot level inputs, by the way? Like this is why and you'll see like the best traders in this community, they use bot level inputs because they can control things from the bot level and easily swap and update them as you go. So like our cherry picker bot, you can clone it, right? And it's got tons of bot level inputs like, do you want to use CCI? Yes? Okay, what length? What signal? You want to use stochastic? Okay, yes, what length? What signal? You can see how we do that at bot level inputs by using this.
So if you're in templates, just simply click on a template, and you can go up here to the bell icon, and you can just click the bell icon like I get notified of this. But you can just click the bell icon. It says get notified of new activity. Then you know that if something happens, you get notified of it, and you'll get a little like reminder and bell icon that says like, hey, somebody just updated this template. And then, you can go and check out the new version of the template.
Do you guys like this structure, by the way? This is a little bit different than some of the other bot workshops if you've been to. We did not build a bot from scratch. Instead, what we're doing this time is we did a deep dive on a particular thing. We're going to try to switch this here and there as we go so that sometimes we build bots from scratch, and sometimes we do a deep dive on a particular thing.
Either one, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you all so much for coming here today. Hopefully, you got a lot out of this. Hopefully, some really cool stuff. If you do have any other follow-up questions, let us know at team@optionalpha. That is where you can reach all of us. You can jump all your emails like dogs on a three-legged cat and try to get a lot of your questions answered as much as possible.
So hopefully, you guys enjoy this. If you have any questions, let us know. team@optionalpha. Until next time, happy trading! Talk to you guys soon.