How to Setup Bots for Hybrid Trading Strategies

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.

Obviously, in today's workshop, we're gonna be talking all about setting up your bots for hybrid trading strategies. You know, like, we see you all doing this like stab-wise on the back end. A lot of people use bots for hybrid trading, which is that they're not fully automated yet, or maybe they're transitioning to automated, and they, you know, just don't feel comfortable trading, 100% automated yet. That's okay.

And so what I want to show you today is kinda how you can set up your bots, set up some buttons and strategies for executing hybrid trading strategies, which would include doing things like manually opening a position and then letting the bot take over automated management or vice versa. That's really what it comes down to you and kind of all the things that you can do around hybrid trading if you want to do that.

The other thing I just want to talk about, and we talked about this in the community, but if you're not even in the community yet, huge announcement that's coming. Just, I'm gonna say it now because it's already out in the community. Somebody else already broke the news for us, but starting August 1st, everybody who is inside of Option Alpha. If you are an Option Alpha member, you get exclusively with our partnership with Tradier, 100% commission for your trading.

It's a huge thing. We're so excited to offer this to everyone. We get no kickback, no referral fees. We get no, like, payment for orders or flows, whatever, nothing. We keep nothing. It's all for you guys. We've been trying to negotiate this for so long, and we're so excited that they finally agreed to it. We're gonna push out. Again, it's exclusive to Option Alpha. Starts August 1st.

All you have to do is sign up with your Tradier account, connect it to Option Alpha, and anything you do with Option Alpha and anything you do trading-wise, as long as you have your Option Alpha membership, becomes 100% commission free. So so cool. Such a good opportunity, so check it out. Make sure it's the right fit for you. Explore all the broker integrations that we have and be on lookout for that on Monday.

All right, strategy goals for today's workshop. Number one, we're gonna implement some bot buttons to trigger automations. These would be both opening and closing positions. Number two, we're gonna build out a very simple hybrid, semi-automated option selling strategy. So at the end of this workshop, I'll share that bot template into the community, so you guys have a copy of it. So all of that stuff will be available inside the bot template for you. Everything that we do today, we'll keep it on one template so that we can kinda go back and forth with it, and then you guys have access to it moving forward if you want to in the future.

Number three, we're gonna focus on planning out automated steps that you'd like to perform by bot buttons. This is a really cool one because it's not just that you can open and close trades at the click of a button, but you could have your bots do some checks if you wanted to. You can have your bots retag positions. Basically, you could do anything you want at the click of a button through the actual automations. So automations are just processes you wanna start, and you can start them through scanners and monitors which run continuously, or you can start them through clicks of a button, which is a cool way to do it.

Number four, we're gonna bring some and share a bunch of new ideas and use cases for trading hybrid strategies. I hope that we can start a really good conversation and share ideas back and forth. We see it a lot. We encourage you guys to share your ideas and your strategies with one another inside of the platform. So once we share this template, go in there and add it to—add your ideas, add your strategies, add your templates to it. So we got a good resource that we can use moving forward.

So here's what we're gonna do. First thing that we're gonna do is we are going to build out just very simple plain bot template. We're gonna call it our hybrid trading template. You can do that here inside of the platform by just going to new bot, and then you can call this hybrid trading template. Whatever you wanna call it. We call it hybrid trading, and we call this one bot workshop so that we know what it is and we can put in there.

I'm just gonna give it a lot of capital for right now, just so that it has room. We'll give it ten positions per day. We can build a bunch of stuff with it and ten positions at any one time. Okay? So now we go ahead, and we say, "let's create that bot," and go over and view that bot. Now the bot's completely empty, right? Which this is good. This is what we want in this case. We just want a simple empty bot that we can start adding to.

The first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how to do some manual trading inside of your bot. so if you want to, you don't have to let the bot open trades automated for you. A lot of people like to do that. I personally like to do that, but if you wanted to open one-off trade, you can do that right inside one of your bot. There's a couple of ways where you can do that, but the easiest way you can do is just simply go down here to little plus icon inside of your position tab. And that' simply is just gonna open a position, and then you would fill out all criteria for that type of position.

So if you wanted to open a short put spread, you could click on short put spread, then you can go over, and you can select the ticker symbol, right? You choose your expiration, your strikes, contracts, how you wanna price it, and you place the trade. There's essentially no different than how you would do it normally with your broker, right? Just a little bit different interface, a little bit different steps, but if you want to go place a trade on Thinkorswim right now, you would do the same thing, right? Or Tradier, or Trade Station, you know, you choose your ticker and all your stuff, right?

What I think you should do, and this is what I encourage you to do, is that don't ever do anything twice. So if you have a strategy that you like to trade over and over and over again, what I encourage you to do is we're gonna create a very simple one-step automation, maybe even a multi-step automation if you want to, and use a bot button to go ahead and execute that trade.

Now what a lot of people do is they trade a very similar strategy over and over again. So here's what I encourage you to do. Go ahead and go to your automations. And we're gonna go down to events, and we're just gonna create a button that recreates that order type for us over and over and over again if we so choose. That's it. We're just setting up like a default button to enter default type of trade, and this is the first way you can start to do this little hybrid trading if you want to where you can be in charge of when the bot opens order or when it sends order, or, you know, all that. You don't have to do anything else. Okay?

So we're gonna hit the button to create an event. And then we're gonna go down here at the bottom where it says button. And we're gonna create our own button. In this case, we'll call this one open. We'll call it wide put spread. Okay? You can call it whatever you want. You can call it Monday's put spread or whatever the case is, okay? Doesn't matter about the button style, and then we're gonna go here, and we're gonna create a brand new automation.

Now, remember, all we're doing with a button is just triggering an automation. So we're gonna call this one Open Button. I like to call them by their, whatever they're doing, so Open Button – Wide Put Spread. Okay? That way, I know when I'm adding this automation up here in the top left by naming it this, then whenever I click this button, I know which automation I'm gonna associate it with. And so now whenever I click the button, me manually trading now, I'm going to trigger this sequence of steps to occur.

So maybe what I wanna do, and this is the most traditional one, and then I'll add a little flavor to it if you guys don't mind, okay? The first thing that people do is they create an open position action. So no different than we were gonna open a position manually, right? Only this time, we're creating that action once and basically saving it in the house, in the wrapper of a automation. Does that make sense?

So here we're gonna go down to a short put spread. We're gonna go, and we can select our symbol if we know what we're always gonna trade. In this case, we're gonna make that symbol field an input. This way, we can reuse that symbol field over and over and over again, and we don't have to create a custom variation for every ticker that we trade. So here, we're just gonna create a very simple ticker input. We can set a default value like SPY if we wanted to. And then we go ahead and save. Again, that's just the only one we're gonna do here.

You can create other inputs for everything else if you want to. You can create them from the expiration, and the short put, and the long put. But ultimately, when you're doing buttons like this, it's kinda because you already have your preferred setup, okay? So we can select our expiration days. We can say, hey, something at least 30 days. We can go down and set our short put, set 30 delta. Set our long put just at a ten delta. That'd be pretty wide, right? Do one contract, and we set our pricing. Basically, just set up your entire training and then go ahead and hit save.

So now, if I were to go ahead and save this, I'll show you what's gonna happen here, okay? If I were to go ahead and save this, which is just simply one action. Did I go too fast for you? That's it. That's all I want the button to do. When I click this button, Open Wide Put Spread, it's going to just run the automation, which is right here and the only thing inside that automation, remember, the only thing in here is just to start sending orders to my broker to try and open this position. That's it. That's all I want it to do. Just go ahead and try to open that position.

So if I go ahead and save this, it's gonna then give me a choice. This is kinda cool. This is where you can be very specific with it, if you want to or not. If you want to, you can set the inputs right now so that they don't ever change like this one will always trigger SPY. Or what I like to do is I like to set it when the button is clicked. That way, I get one little extra prompt essentially that says, hey, you're about to run this automation. It has got some inputs, mainly the ticker symbol; what ticker do you wanna trade? Okay? So I'm gonna do it when the button is clicked, and then I'm gonna go ahead and hit save.

So that adds the events to my list of events, and then you see up here if I just refresh here, you can see now I've got this button in the top left-hand corner. So here's what's gonna happen, right? We can watch this one. So in here, right, there's nothing in here. It's just a little dummy account, right? Let me just give it some more capital here, so it's got some room to do some stuff on our demo here. Okay? Now I'll show you couple different things that we're gonna do.

So the first thing that we're gonna do here, just because I wanna show you whole progression of it, is I'm gonna click this button, which is gonna just immediately trigger that automation which is just gonna try to open a position, right? So if I click the button, then it's gonna give me that prompt which is all I wanted, right? Because I said, I was gonna set the ticker symbol when I click the button. So I'm gonna say ticker symbol SPY, yes, okay go head, run the automation. It's running the automation. Great. Now it's trying to enter a position.

This is the position that it's trying to enter, and if you go back over to positions, you can see that it's going through its progression, right? Sending and canceling orders through smart pricing, right? At the click of a button, for the exact setup that I was using.

Now, this is cool because if you want to go ahead and make trades like this, you can do this, right? I didn't have the bot, you know, filter through a bunch of technical indicators and a bunch of things. If you're just sitting there and you're like, you know what? I wanna enter a wide short put spread. Great. Just click the button, choose your ticker symbol like we can do GLD here, and run the automation. Start sending orders, right?

This is still dramatically better than you sitting down, putting the order together, canceling, and replacing all of your positions, right? So now this is what it's doing. You can see here that the GLD position opened pretty quickly, but that's all it's doing with the button click is just simply going over, running that automation, which has nothing but open a position, and then trying to open that position. So now we have two brand new positions that we essentially entered manually, but we do a little bit of automation work here, a little bit of hybrid trading because it did go through and choose the strikes based on our criteria, but it's the same general set up that we're using in both cases. Okay?

Now that we have those two positions here, we can also choose, if we want to, to close those positions manually. You can do this at any time for any, any reason, okay? You can do this at any time for any reason, for any positions that you have, which a lot of people don't know. You don't have to close your positions through an automation.

You just see a position, and you're like, you know what? I've got a $1 profit. Great, I wanna try to capture that or whatever the case is. You can try to close the position. Go ahead and close it. You can even adjust the pricing and say, you know what? I wanna try to get 3.47. that's what I'd like to do. So I would like to send an order just for 3.47. great! Go ahead and send that order, right? You can do that. That's okay. You can manually close anything that you see inside of your platform.

So here's your short put spread, right? We're trying to get a fill at $3.47, which is very specific price. Not filling, as always, you can go in here. Cancel the trade if you want to, right? And go back to the position. So you can do all of these back and forth.

So here's what we're gonna do this time. This time we're gonna do a little bit of hybrid trading. We're gonna start gravitating a little bit further towards hybrid trading. So now what I want to do is I want to modify this open wide put spread button, okay? I wanna modify this open wide put spread button. And now what I want to do is I'm gonna in here, I'm gonna open up the automation, and now what I wanna do is that when the button is clicked, I don't just want to close my eyes and make a trade. Okay?

Now, I'm not saying that's the bad way to go. I'm just saying you could do a lot now because you have bots and automations at your disposal. So one thing that we could do is we could precede this decision, and remember, it's gonna run instantly at the time that we go ahead and click this button. You could precede this decision with some very logical steps to filter for that trade opportunity. Maybe you're looking to enter a wide put spread, but you're only willing to enter that wide put spread if the rate of the return on the position is greater than some value.

So what you would want to do is let the bots do a little bit this pre-filtering for you, even if you know you want to get into a position just to double-check yourself. Okay? So we could use any of our position, oh sorry, not position. I'm gonna go down to opportunities. Any of our opportunity-based recipes because the bot is gonna be looking at this potential opportunity, and it's gonna be evaluating it for you. So the one we can use right now is opportunity rate of return.

We can check and see if the opportunity rate of return is greater than some amount. And so we select the opportunity. The bot is smart enough to know, hey. You were trying to get into this position here. Do you still want us to check that same position? We say, yep, we would love for you to check that same position, right? And see if the rate of return is greater than what. What do you think? Like 30%, something like that. You could do that.

You could also add a bunch of different other opportunity recipes here as well. You could also check and ensure that the bid ask spread is really tight and narrow. So this is a really good one to use this opportunity bid ask spread one. Again, super easy. You add it one, and it's in there forever. You check and make sure that same opportunity that you want the bot to evaluate. Make sure that the spread on that position is less than some amount that you deem low enough in order to send positions over or send orders over to your broker.

This is a really easy, simple check just to make sure. Hey, even though you're gonna try to trade, we can't do that, right? So let's do like, we'll set it really low here, like less than 1% or less than 1 penny, right? Because it's probably won't happen, right? So if you set it really low here, and you want the bot to check for all these things, it's gotta meet all these criteria before it gets to the point of opening a position. Does that make sense?

So if I hit save, I'm gonna go ahead and say I want all these actions to precede the yes path. Now think about what we're doing here for a second, okay? Think about what we're doing here for a second. We're telling the bot when we click the button, bot, we would like you first to go ahead and check and make sure that the potential trade I'm about to get into has a rate of return greater than 30%, and in this case, we like really stress test it and say, hey, look, the bid-ask spread is gonna be less than $0.01. Just not gonna happen, right? So we know it's gonna go down the no path. But we're gonna put in some sort of spread filter there, and only if that criteria is met, go ahead and send my order over to my broker.

This is what's so cool about doing it this way oppose to the other manual way because now, with a button click, you also have the processing power of the bots behind you to do all filtering and checking you want to enter your position. Okay? You can do all that behind the processing power of the bots.

So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna just test this thing out. So we're gonna go here and save, okay? It's the same button that we had before. See if I have enough capital. I think I do, right? So now we're gonna go here. We're gonna click this button. We're gonna tell it what ticker we wanna trade. Let's choose a different ticker like IWM, and then we're gonna hit run automation. Now, remember, when it happens is when the automation runs, it's gonna go through to two steps, right? It's gotta go through two things. It's gotta do the filters, and only if the filters would've said yes, would it have continued to the next path.

So now, if I go here and right here in my log, I know why it didn't enter the position. You remember earlier, and if you don't remember, go back on the recording when we post it. Do you remember earlier it showed that it started to send orders for a position? Well, here, when I click the button, it didn't send orders because it failed at the first step, right? Which is cool.

So it, literally in that click of a button, the bots calculating my rate of return for me to make sure it's over my threshold before I send the order over to my broker. So here, you can see the rate of return is 19.05%. I know it probably might be different now, so we'll just click it again. Set the ticker is IWM. Go ahead and click it. Okay, now what's it at? Nope. You can see like, literally, it's changing by the second, by the minute. At the time that we click the button, it's using market data to pull that in right away.

So now you can see it's not over my threshold. So if you wanted to, and again, I'm not saying you do this. I'm just showing you how it works. We'll just modify this a little bit so we can get some different results. So let's bring this down to say 10%. Not saying you do this. I'm just saying that we can modify this to see some different results.

Let's go ahead and do this. We're gonna click IWM again. It'll probably pass the first decision, but notice that it fails at the next decision because of the spread. So remember, now we're telling the bot, hey, as soon as I click you like as soon as I do this, go ahead and check the rate of return and then if you pass that, check the spread, and only if you pass that can you send a trade. Now the bot's stopping the position from happening. This is that hybrid trading. Bot is not triggering these events to happen. You are triggering these events to happen.

So let me go in here and let me set these at, I don't know, something at least get it through, okay? Would you guys agree? I'm gonna set this fairly wide. I'll say like 15 cents. Let me just set it even wider just because I want to get it through, okay? So we'll set it less than $0.20. Remember, smart pricing can still work through pricing for you. I'm gonna go up here. I'm gonna say open wide put spread. Choose my ticker. Run the automation, and now look at the decision log that you have.

This is the log for the button that you just clicked. Did I meet all my criteria? Yes, cause I adjusted it all down, right? 18.5% return, $0.08 spread, right? So now what you can do here is now you see that it passed all that criteria. You got a yes vote on that, and now you can go in, and it's starting to open that position, right? Starting to work through the logic to open that position. Notice it did it, right? That's what it was doing. That's it. It was starting to work through that logic for the position. You've got a brand new position inside of your account. Okay?

Now notice I did all of that without scanners, without monitors. I just set up a nice sweet little awesome button, and then I just go ahead and just click the button whenever I want to.

Here's another way that you can do things. So let me just modify this button just a little bit, okay? If I wanted to, now what I could do here is I can make things really specific if I wanted to. So I can go to my settings, and I can say, open wide put spread, and I can give myself a little bit more information like a .30 to .10 delta put spread, okay? That's what basically my setup is here. And I can even if I wanted to, I know what I was gonna trade, I can just go ahead and set that right now if I wanted to. But I'll just keep it at set it when the button is clicked, okay?

So now the button says open wide put spread at .30 to .10 delta. Great, awesome. Now I wanna add another button here. This time I wanna open a narrow put spread. This time we'll do a .30 to .20 delta put spread, okay? I'm gonna open a narrow delta. Now I don't have to recreate everything from scratch. I can come in here, and I can create a copy of this button that I've already created. Remember I said we try not to do things twice if we don't have to, right? Well, don't recreate it from scratch. Just create a copy of this one. It mimics the entire setup, but now this is our new copy, and we can call this one narrow or something like that, right?

We go in here, and we just can modify how we want it to be narrow. We just changed the deltas. Say we want the delta to be .20 delta, right? So this is a little bit more narrow setup. We just modify these to use the next .20 delta opportunity, right? Cause we still want to monitor that same opportunity that we had before or that we're gonna potentially be using for this button. So we just modify it, okay? We just modify it. We just reconnect those fields. I know I went a little bit fast there, but you see, all I'm doing is just reconnecting the fields instead of building it all over again.

Once I'm good to go, I hit save. I hit save again. I tell it that I want it to set the ticker input when the button is clicked, and then I go ahead and hit save. And now, on my automation tab, notice I have a bunch of buttons up here. And at the click of a button, I can open a wide spread, and I can open a narrow spread, right? Pretty cool.

So now, if I wanna open a narrow spread, I just click this button, and it says, okay, what position do you want to open a narrow spread on? All right, let's try EEM. Alright, let's see what we get here on EEM. Great. Passed all of our filters. 20% return, less than $0.08 bid ask spread, great. It was less than our $0.20 that we set. Awesome. It's gonna start sending orders over to open a narrow spread in EEM.

So I go over here to my position tab. Great, already entered a position. Now I'm doing this a little bit hybrid. You can add a bunch of these buttons here to your board, and all of these buttons just eventually run your automations or trigger something or open a position or do whatever you wanna do at a click of a button.

Notice I'm inside of any 15 minutes scanning and intervals and stuff like that, right? So if I wanna open another one, great. I can just open another one. I choose XOP. Try, I guess I can say try to open it. Oh, tough luck. XOP, right? That's good. The bot prevented me from opening something with a ridiculous widespread right now, which is good. That's what I want it to do. So I can sit here with my little dashboard of bots and go through all little checks and balances for it.

What we're gonna do next? This is what we're gonna talk about how we can now start to do some more hybrid trading in the context of letting the bots or letting ourselves open positions like we just did. Notice we opened a bunch of positions. And now, let's say I want the bot to automate all the exits. Like I'm super lazy, which I am. This is why I build this cause I'm lazy for trading. I want the bots to do it for me. And I'm super lazy, and I want the bots to go ahead and manage positions for me.

Now I want to be in control of opening positions, which is why I don't have any scanners that are looking for positions. Oh no, no, no. I'm gonna tell the bot when I want it to open, okay? In this example. But I don't want to have to worry about the headache and the hassle of managing positions. So what I can do is I can add a monitor to my bot. Now, remember, the reason that we set this up is specifically for this reason for you all. When we architected this years ago, is because we knew that you might wanna do a little bit of this hybrid trading. So now we can add a monitor automation. We can just automate a portion of our trading strategy if we wanted it.

So now I go in here to my monitors, and I select my monitors. We're gonna build a new automation. This is gonna be our monitor, okay? This is gonna be our monitor, and we're just gonna call it our hybrid put spread monitor, okay? Just put whatever you wanna call it. Doesn't really matter. But in this case, I know this is meant to be used in bots that I want to do some hybrid trading on. Now you don't have to do this. You can always use your same monitor automation if you want to. Doesn't matter.

The first thing that I'm gonna do when I add my action is I'm gonna go down here to my position loops, okay? To my position loops. What the position loop does and the reason that you probably wanna add it as one of your first actions, it's more traditionally added this way, is it loops through all of your positions. It's kind of like telling the bot, hey bot, can you please bring in all the data on all these positions that I have so that we can do some analysis together?

So you're gonna add a position loop. Now you can loop it for all positions, or you can loop it for certain types of positions. Now in my case, because I'm entering put spreads, I'm gonna tell the bot, look, only look at short put spreads because I'm gonna build this automation specifically for short put spreads, right? It's like, you know, like, I'm not building this for every type of trading strategy. I'm building this for just short put spreads because they may have their own little oddities. Okay?

So now I'm gonna hit save. And now the first thing the bot's gonna do is it's gonna loop through every short put spread position that I have. Now I can tell the bot, all right, for every short put spread position that I have, I want you to take a certain set of action and decisions. That's it. It's like looking at your positions and you monitoring them one by one. Do you guys do this right now, right? If you're manually trading, you'll look at position. You go through some checks and balances in your head, ask yourself some questions, and then you look at the next position. That's what the bot is doing. You're just telling it; hey, loop through all these positions and do some decisions.

So maybe the first decision you might wanna do, and we won't build out like an entire massive one here today. But just a couple decisions that you can add in here. Is you can check and see if the position, see these are position based recipes. You gotta have position for the bot to be able to use positions, right? So the position, you can check and see if the return is over a certain percentage.

So let's say we wanna use this recipe, which is check the position return that's greater than some value. Now we can select the position. We're just gonna connect it to the already existing position it's looping through. So it's gonna check one by one, each position, and then it's gonna check the return. Now you can check all kinds of different metrics here, right? Like you can check the ask price, or the PNL, or whatever. Whatever you wanna do, right?

We're just gonna say, check and see if the return is greater than, I don't know, 5%. Okay? Some level that you wanted to put it at. So you're saying, look, I want you to check and see if the return is greater than 5%, okay? And then go ahead and save.

So what it's gonna do now is every time that the automation runs, for the first position, it's gonna loop through that position. Check and see if the return's 5%. If it is, it goes down the yes path. For the second position, it'll come in here, check and see is the return greater than 5%. Yes? Go down the yes path. The third position, you might have it ask and see if the return is greater than 5%. It might be a no for that particular position, so that position goes down the no path.

So now you can add other decisions here, but here you could say, alright, let's say that the position return is greater than 5%. Then you might wanna start adding some closing actions. Now what I would suggest doing is also adding some decisions to make sure that the position bid/ask spread is still narrow even on exit. You've started to see that we've added this to a lot of our bots and templates, and it's highly encouraged that you do so as well.

So you can come in here and say, you know what, if I have a nice profit, can I also check? And you can. You can also say, hey, I want to check and make sure that the position's bid/ask spread. So remember how we check the bid ask spread on trade entry? Well, we can check the bid/ask spread on trade exit too, and we should because then you can ensure that you're not having this wide position that the bot's monitoring.

So you can say, you know what? I wanna make sure that the bid/ask spread on exit is less than five cents, or whatever criteria you want. You can check whatever you want, okay? So you wanna make sure that the bid ask spread is less than five cents? Great. If it is less than five cents, and if I have a 5% return, okay, go ahead, and I'm gonna add an action here to close the position. What position do I want to close? I wanna go ahead and close whatever position you're looking at, bot. Position one or two or five or whatever. Okay, go ahead and close the position.

Let's say that I don't have a 5% return. Well, I can have the bot make another decision like checking to see if the position expires in a certain number of days, right? If I don't have my exact profit right now, that's okay. But maybe I can check and see if the position expires in less than; I don't know, what is it for you guys? Two days, right? If it expires in less than two days, maybe I wanna close the position as well. So you add that decision to your automation editor. But you're basically just having the bot make all those decisions for you and then eventually leading down your closing position.

Now here's another way you could do hybrid trading. This is a really special one. I don't think I've ever gone through this exact example on a workshop, but it's something you should consider doing, okay? Something you should consider doing. Let's say that the position you're looking at never has a 5% return. Never. And then it gets to this decision here, and the position does expire in less than two days. Well, we could still add, and I will encourage you to add, this position checked to see if the bid/ask spread is narrow. Because you certainly don't want to force a position closed if the bid/ask spread temporarily, which it can be, is really, really wide.

So let's say that the bid/ask spread is not less than ten cents. So we're gonna check and see if the bid/ask spread is less than ten cents, and it's inside two market days. We're gonna go ahead and let the bot close the position, okay? Let the bot close the position.

Now, look at this, just for a second here. This is what I'm telling the bot to do. If I don't have a 5% return, so the answer to that question is no. and then it gets to does the position expire in two days, meaning like you're running out of time, expiration is coming. Yes. I want it to check and make sure that before it starts sending orders, that the spreads are pretty narrow. And if the spreads are narrow, great, go ahead and close the position. Thank you so much. Save me the time and hassle of doing anything. That's what you're supposed to do.

But more importantly than that is, they can alert you to crazy market situations. So what you can do inside of your bots, what I've done even in some of the template bots that we put out there, especially the Hexabot, is I basically gone ahead and down paths where I need to take immediate action. I've had the bot send me a notification.

So here down the no path, if I'm inside two days and the bid/ask spread is wide, which means I should be closing the position, but the spreads are too wide. I can have the bot send me a notification, and I can be like, hey, yo, I need to close a position, but the spreads are too wide. Maybe you should close for me. Whatever. Okay? Whatever you wanna do. And I usually do like love, your bot.

So you're gonna send yourself- this is the coolest thing- you're gonna send yourself a notification from the bot that says, hey, I need to close a position, but the spreads are too wide. Maybe you should close it for me. And you get that notification, right? You can send yourself a notification for anything you want. Just put it as a branch, right? This's just an action. You can put this action wherever you want, at any step, in between steps, whatever, right? So then you'd come in, and you'd be like, all right, what position do I have that needs to be closed?

So if we get to this point and you get an alert on your platform, then you know you might need to take some action because that's how maybe you set it up. And that's where that hybrid manual trading comes in where maybe the bot is like automating it, and maybe it automates the close of 99 out of 100 trades, but the one trade that it tries to close where the spreads are too wide. Great, you get a notification, and then you go close it if you want to.

So I'm gonna leave this one here for now as like our hybrid spread monitor. It's just an example, okay? And once we're good to go, we simply hit save. We build this new monitor automation, and if we hit save one more time, then it adds the monitor to our bot. Now, in this case, for this particular bot that we have right here, okay? We have our monitor set up for hybrid management. We have no scanners in place, right? Because we are entering all positions ourselves with bot buttons.

Now, this point, this monitor automation is not going to run. Why? Because we haven't done one thing that we need to do in order to make sure that that monitor automation starts running. We gotta go up here to the top right hand corner. I'll let you guys answer. Turn it on, yeah. Turn on your automations. Right?

Notice we have very specific verbiage here on purpose, which is turn on automations, right? And now we know the automations are on, which as soon as you do that, notice that you get a little indicator here that says waiting. Like it's waiting for the next iteration to now start running through and sequencing through all the things that it's supposed to do, which we're gonna let it do, right? That's gonna happen in 4 minutes. So this bot is gonna start running through that monitor automation in four minutes, and it's gonna start managing all the positions that we have.

So we've got four positions here. They're all put spreads. Some of them are profitable, so we'll see what we kinda get out of this, right? Right? We'll kinda see what we do we get out of that monitor automation, but inside the log here, we will be able to then view all the activity that happens inside that monitor.

Now while we're doing that, just doesn't know, we also can view in the log any time that a button gets clicked or an order get sent, or anything manual that happens in the bot. The log tracks all of that for your bot, which gives you a lot of clarity. So, for example, if you come in here and you're like, hey, I clicked the button, and I clicked out the screen, and I really didn't read the log details or anything like that. Why didn't it enter a position?

Well, you can come in here, and you can click on it and say, oh, this is why I didn't enter that position. Because I clicked the button, right? To open the put spread that was narrow, and my rate of return was great, but my spreads were too wide. Okay, great. Or you can go down to any other ones, like this one. Ah, that's right. I clicked this button. It checked this, it checked this, and then it opened a position because all of that was good. So the log is really important. The log is where you can actually show all this in here as well.

Now inside of the automations, we're gonna let this run here another like three minutes. Okay? Let it run, and we'll come back here and check this. But what we can also do, if you wanted to, okay? This is kinda cool. We can come here, and we can create another button. We can create another button that says run hybrid monitor. Guys, you don't have to go in here and let the automations run continuously. You can also create a button to run one of your automations.

So if you wanted to just come in here and create this hybrid monitor, like you already created the automation, you can also create a button for it. Now, if I click this button, it will run this monitor. And then if I don't click this button because the automations are on, it's gonna run them again for me at the next 15 minute interval.

So you can do a little bit of bouncing back and forth where you can have a management style that you run inside of your bots. For example, I have one that's pre-built in my library called 25% profit taker. It looks for anything like scan for, or like, take 25%. Oops, not 25. 25% profits. So what this particular automation does is it loops through positions, checks to see if anything went down by 25%. If it did, closes it. That's it.

And because I can add this one to my dashboard too, now I can come in here and through the combination of these buttons up here, I can open positions with these buttons if I want to. I can choose to close positions or manage positions with these buttons. This one does my normal management. This one just takes a look for 25% profits and then cleans up the deck, right? Basically. So I can do that, and I have my monitor automation running regardless because automations are turned on. So I have all of these different options, no pun intended, of what I can possibly do.  

So up here, you can see the automations ran, so let's go to the log. And notice that our hybrid monitor automation ran on schedule because we turned on the automation. You guys see that? If I click it, now what it's doing is it was looping through four different positions that I had. Okay?

Now, again, this is what so cool about it. It's checking all these stuff for you, right? You entered them manually cause we did. Now it's taking over control and monitoring them automatically. So the first one, your SPY short put spread. Is the return greater than 5%? Yes, it's 6.896%. Great, it went to the next decision. Is the bid/ask spread less than 5 cents? No, it's 11 cents. Now I did that on purpose to like force it to start to get some of these decisions. But you can put the spread at whatever you feel comfortable with. But what that's telling you is like you have a profit. Spreads may be a little wide, so you may not exit that position right away.

Go to your GLD position. Notice that it changes the decisions for that particular position. So here, it's checking the GLD position. Do I have the 5% profit? Nope. I'm actually down 8.6% on this position. Great. Does it expire in two days? Nope, it expires in 26 days. Basically, it's just kinda keep looking for that profit for you until it gets inside of two days.

Then you go to IWM. Same thing. An EEM, same thing. So only one could have been potentially closed, but the spreads are not wide enough. The spreads are 11 cents. So here's what you could do. You could come up here to your automation and say, you know what? I want you to check all over again.

Now what I wanna do is instead of- now my automations are still on, right? So you can see it. Last ran three minutes ago. Great, thank you so much, bot, for telling me that. Now what I can do is I can check it right now. I can say run my hybrid monitor right now. Now I don't have to wait for the automations to go at the next interval. That's just set up so that you can do that on intervals, but you can check it here right now.

So now you can see the SPY position is at 7.47%, and now the bid/ask spread is still at 11 cents. You just come in here if you want to and just have these right here. You can run this one. Take 25% profits, right? So it's gonna look for anything that have a 25% profit. Well, we know nothing did because we basically just entered all these positions. But the key is is that you could have these buttons in here. Just go ahead and just clean up anything that has a 25% profit.

So the hybrid trading that you can do here is pretty crazy. When you really think about the differences and how you can set up all these different types of buttons. If you wanted to, is you can do something totally, totally in reverse, which is instead of doing everything hybrid opening, or manual opening, and then automated closing, which is how we have it set up right now.

You could do it in reverse if you wanted to, which is you could add your own scanners to this, right? I'm just gonna add these for the sake of brevity for our thing. We can just add around scanners like high IV scanner, right? This is our scanner that we would add, right? You add that here. And now it's gonna go look for all those positions for you. And if you don't want it to monitor your positions, just go ahead and take your monitor out.

If I just delete this, now the only thing that the bot is doing is scanning an opening positions, which means that I am left to be at the sole discretionary as to when positions come off. A lot of people like to do it this way. They like to let the bot do all the seeking and finding, but when a position actually comes in line, then they wanna be the ones in control of closing the positions. They can come in here and run the hybrid monitor to take 25% profits. They can come in here and manually close things one by one. It's really up to you how you want to do it. Okay?

I hope you guys enjoy this. If you have any questions or follow up please let us know. We have tons of workshops that are already pre-recorded. If you like today's workshop, please go back into the workshop sections of the website. Check all the other recordings that we've done too. I bet you'll learn a lot of stuff. Don't forget to sign up for the next workshop that we're doing next week on Thursday. We have nine more workshops schedule right now, more to come. Every week, on Thursday, for the next nine weeks straight.

So if you want to dive deep into this, we're gonna go really, really deep into auto trading and a lot of different topics. You don't wanna miss any of them. So be sure to make sure that you check that out as soon as you can. So make sure you sign up for all of those, and then we'll jump in. Have a great rest of your Thursday.

Thank you so much for joining us. Steve, Mike, everybody, thank you, Larry, for helping out on support. Really appreciate it. As always, we'll make sure that we get you guys links you guys need, and until next time, happy trading! Take care.