Intro to Option Alpha
Welcome to the Option Alpha help docs.
Our Mission
To empower you with the tools needed to be a highly successful options trader. We believe something better than traditional manual trading is needed to compete in today's market dominated by high speed computers. The Option Alpha platform leverages advanced math, backtesting and automation to find better trades, increase consistency, reduce emotion/bias and improve long-term trading results.
How Is Option Alpha Different?
Here are some ways you can use Option Alpha to be a more powerful options trader:
Automation
Use bot automations to find, open and manage positions that match your entry criteria
Use Exit Options to monitor and close positions when your exit criteria are met
Leverage SmartPricing to get trades filled at the best available price
Backtesting
Backtest a strategy to fine tune for maximum profits
Search Top Backtests to find a new strategy
Find Trades
Use Trade Ideas to "shop" for trades with a positive expected value (EV)
Scan for 0DTE trades by backtesting position metrics against historical price movements
Screen for new symbols by options liquidity, technical indicators, momentum and more
Innovative Research Reports updated nightly
Find backtested earnings trades with Earnings Edge
Learn From Other Traders
Explore the Top Bot Templates in the OA community
See the Top Strategies other traders are using to find success
Get help and learn from the collective knowledge of the OA community
Why Bots
Bots are like a trading assistants that perform trading tasks for you. Bots are consistent, emotionless and systematic. Bots can do many things including:
Scan for new positions that match your entry criteria
Initiate trades to open positions when they are available
Place multiple orders between the bid/ask spread to get trades filled at the best possible price
Monitor positions waiting for predefined exit conditions
Combine all of these to execute a fully automated trading strategy.
Automations
Your bot can use market data and indicators to make decisions, open and close positions, send you notifications and much more. Automations are the instructions you add to your bot that define the actions you want it to perform:
Automations can be scheduled to run continuously every 1 minute, based on a repeating schedule, when you click a button, and many more options:
Scanning for Positions
For example, add a scanner automation to your bot to watch for specific entry conditions and automatically open a position when it's available:
Monitoring and Exiting Positions
After your bot opens a position, it will monitor the position every 1 minute checking for your predefined exit criteria:
You can also add a monitor automation to your bot that checks for more specific exit conditions:
Transparency
Everything the bot does is logged with full transparency. No black box here! Your bot's log has details of what happened each time an automation runs:
Including the actions executed in the automation:
You can even inspect the exact data the bot used when making decisions:
and opening positions:
Profit and Loss
Your bot logs the profit and loss for all of its positions so you can keep track of it's profitability:
Fully Automated Example Bots
The bot templates below include a step-by-step video showing how to set up a bot from scratch to find, open and manage positions automatically:
New Ways To Find Trading Opportunities
Option Alpha provides several innovative ways for finding new trades, each tool designed to provide insights for a specific trading opportunity available to options traders...
Finds trades with an edge based on EV and probabilities.
The Trade Ideas backend scans continuously during market hours (9:35 am - 3:55 pm) and finds trade ideas in 3 ways:
Analyzes the top-performing position setups used by all traders in the platform.
Analyzes every option series expiring in 45 days or less that falls on a Friday and matches up every possible combination of legs at common delta values.
It examines all current open positions in the platform that are looking for opportunities.
Find and analyze 0DTE and next-day trading opportunities.
It aims to solve the problem of probabilities and expected value (EV) being less accurate for 0DTE trades by providing backtest results to help us identify quality trades instead of relying on probabilities.
Each trade's metrics are backtested against the underlying's previous 1 year of intraday minute data to see how trading a similar position daily would have performed over that time.
Thank you for joining us on this mission!
This platform is the result of a highly collaborative process between the Option Alpha team and thousands of options traders who use it daily. Please join us in the community to share feedback or get answers to any questions you may have. We are very grateful to have you here and happy to help you find success.
With love,
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