
<h2>What Was the PDT Rule?</h2>
<p>The <strong>pattern day trader (PDT) rule</strong> was a regulation that classified you as a "pattern day trader" if you made <strong>more than three day trades in a rolling five-business-day period</strong> in a margin account. Once flagged, your account effectively couldn't keep day trading <strong>unless you maintained at least $25,000</strong> in it.</p>
<p>For well-funded traders this was a non-issue. But for anyone starting small — like trading with $1,000 — it was a real barrier. You couldn't freely day trade in a margin account, which made it hard to run the spread strategies that options traders rely on.</p>

<h2>What Changed on June 4, 2026?</h2>
<p>The <strong>SEC officially eliminated the $25,000 PDT rule</strong>, with the change taking effect <strong>June 4, 2026</strong>. In practical terms: <strong>anyone can now day trade as much as they want</strong> — including 0DTE options — without worrying about being classified as a pattern day trader or needing a $25,000 balance.</p>

<h2>Why This Matters for Spread Traders</h2>
<p>Before the change, you <em>could</em> open a <strong>cash account</strong> and day trade options fairly easily — but you <strong>couldn't trade spreads</strong>. That ruled out some of the best-known defined-risk strategies:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Iron condors</strong></li>
<li><strong>Credit spreads</strong></li>
<li><strong>Iron butterflies</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>With the PDT rule gone, those strategies are now on the table for traders of <strong>any account size</strong> — not just accounts above $25,000.</p>

<h2>How to Take Advantage With 0DTE Bots</h2>
<p>The approach in the video is to stop trading manually and instead run <strong>automated options bots</strong>. Automation means you don't have to sit in front of the screen all day, and you can <strong>backtest a strategy first</strong> to see how it would have performed before going live.</p>
<p>Now that the PDT rule is gone, this opens the door to running <strong>0DTE (zero-days-to-expiration) bots</strong> freely. In general, 0DTE bots tend to produce <strong>smoother, more consistent results</strong> than 1DTE or 7DTE bots, and you never have to hold a position overnight.</p>

<h3>1. Backtest a Strategy</h3>
<p>Run a backtest on a strategy — for example, a SPY, QQQ, or IWM iron condor or credit spread — and review how the equity curve looks over time.</p>

<h3>2. Clone It Live in One Click</h3>
<p>Once a backtest looks good, you can <strong>clone that exact strategy to your live trading account</strong> with one click, or start from one of the <strong>pre-built templates</strong> (split into 1DTE and 0DTE sets).</p>

<h3>3. Build a 0DTE Portfolio</h3>
<p>Because there's no PDT limit anymore, you can run a <strong>portfolio made entirely of 0DTE bots</strong> — say a SPY bot, a QQQ bot, and an IWM bot — all trading the same day and never holding overnight.</p>

<h3>4. Test With Smaller Accounts</h3>
<p>You no longer need to fund a single $25,000 account. You can fund <strong>multiple smaller accounts</strong> — $2,000, $5,000, or whatever you're comfortable with — and test different strategies in parallel across supported brokers like <strong>Tasty Trade and TradeStation</strong>.</p>

<h2>The Bottom Line</h2>
<p>The end of the PDT rule is a genuine breakthrough for smaller traders. If you're brand new, you're starting in a great time: you can day trade spreads and run 0DTE options bots without a $25,000 minimum. The simplest way to capitalize is to <strong>backtest your strategies, turn the best ones into bots, and let them trade automatically</strong>.</p>


The SEC eliminated the $25,000 PDT rule on June 4, 2026. Here's how to day trade 0DTE options spreads with any account size using automated bots.

The PDT Rule Is Dead: Day Trade 0DTE With Any Account Size

PDT Rule Eliminated: Trade 0DTE Without $25K | OptionBots

Starting today, the PDT rule is officially dead. The SEC has officially eliminated the $25,000 PDT rule, with the changes officially taking effect on June 4th, 2026. In this video, I'm going to talk about what that means for you and how to take advantage of it now that basically anyone can trade zero DTE, or they can day trade as much as they want without having to worry about that rule.

If for whatever reason you weren't trading before this day, there was something called the PDT rule. This is my Tasty Trade account, and because I'm filming this a day before it goes into effect, there's something called the "reset pattern day trader status." What this means is that if you make more than three day trades in a rolling five-day business period, your margin account may be classified as PDT. And it basically just doesn't let you trade. This was a huge issue because, as long as you had more than $25,000, you didn't have to worry about it. But eight years ago when I started trading and I only had $1,000 to my name, that was an issue. I wasn't able to day trade in a margin account, which meant it was really hard to trade certain spread strategies, especially with options.

If you wanted to, you could just open up a cash account, and it was pretty easy to day trade options that way — but you couldn't trade spreads. You couldn't do iron condors, credit spreads, or iron butterflies, all the great strategies that I'm trading now. So here's what you can do to really take advantage of this.

I've completely changed to trading with automated options bots specifically. The reason is that now I don't have to sit in front of the screen all day, and it's just way better than trading manually. I don't have to worry about whether my strategy is going to work — I can come here, backtest one of my bots, and just see if it works. And now that the PDT rule is officially dead, it just completely opened up the door. Now anybody can run a bunch of zero DTE bots, and zero DTE bots just work better than the 1DTE or 7DTE bots in general.

This is huge because on our platform, you can see one of the backtests we ran. We have a bunch of bots on here like these SPY iron condor zero DTE ones — they perform really well. These are automated trades I get into every day on my broker, and I wouldn't be able to trade this unless I had $25,000. But now that the PDT rule is gone, I can take this exact strategy and just clone it to my live trading account. It's really cool because we also offer pre-built templates. On our template guide, we had to split it: we have our 1DTE bots and then our zero DTE bots. All these zero DTE bots just performed really well — the charts look very smooth.

The way I'm taking advantage of this in 2026, coming into 2027, is simply by focusing mainly on zero DTE bots, because I can now have a portfolio where all the bots I'm running are zero DTE and I never have to worry about holding something overnight. And it opens the door for if you have $5,000 in your account, or $2,000, and you want to try a few different accounts or strategies and just test with a small account — you can now do that. You don't have to fund $25,000 in an account.

So what I'm doing now is testing a bunch of zero DTE backtests and seeing which ones work. I can take a beautiful backtest, clone it, and it can just auto-trade for me. Now I can set up as many of these as I want — a SPY one, a QQQ one, an IWM one — and I no longer have that PDT issue in effect.

As you're watching this now, PDT is no longer going to be a thing. Across all the different accounts I have, I don't have to worry about getting classified with PDT or making sure I don't hold overnight. It really is a huge breakthrough for traders. If you're brand new to trading, congrats — you started in a good time where you don't have to worry about this anymore.

How I'm taking advantage is simply running a bunch of zero DTE options trading bots on my account using spreads. And now that there's no PDT, I can test it with other accounts as much as I want. The best part is that we support multiple brokers, including Tasty Trade and TradeStation, so you can fund multiple different accounts with small amounts of money and test different strategies to see which ones you want to run.

So I hope you guys enjoyed this video. It was a quick one, but it goes over exactly what I'm doing in this new age of non-PDT. It really is an exciting time to be a trader, especially as an options spread trader. If you want to check out the platform where you can backtest all your trading strategies and then turn them into bots in one click — or build your own bots, or use some of our pre-built templates — hit the link in the description and test it out with our 30-day money-back guarantee. Subscribe to the channel and I'll see you in the next video.


<h2>What Is a 0DTE Iron Condor?</h2>
<p>An <strong>iron condor</strong> is a neutral options strategy: you sell an out-of-the-money put spread and an out-of-the-money call spread at the same time. It profits when the underlying stays <strong>range-bound</strong> — it doesn't need the market to go up or down, just to avoid a big move in either direction.</p>
<p>A <strong>0DTE (zero-days-to-expiration)</strong> iron condor uses options that expire the same day. On SPX this is popular because intraday the market often <strong>chops around and does very little</strong>. There are occasional trend days, but a range-bound day is common — which is exactly the environment an iron condor wants.</p>

<h2>Why Trade an Iron Condor on SPX?</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>It's neutral.</strong> You don't need to predict direction — just that price stays within a range.</li>
<li><strong>SPX behavior fits it.</strong> Index price action frequently stays choppy and flat intraday.</li>
<li><strong>It's easy to define.</strong> Your max risk and max reward are known the moment you enter.</li>
<li><strong>It automates cleanly.</strong> Clear rules for deltas, width, and exits make it a great fit for a bot.</li>
</ul>

<h2>How to Build the Bot (Step by Step)</h2>
<p>Here's the exact workflow from the video — building a live SPX iron condor bot from scratch.</p>

<h3>1. Add a Trading Bot</h3>
<p>From your dashboard, click <strong>Add a Trading Bot</strong> and choose to <strong>build your own</strong> instead of using a template, so you can see the full process.</p>

<h3>2. Name It and Choose the Strategy</h3>
<p>Give it a name like <em>"S&amp;P Iron Condor Bot,"</em> set it to <strong>Live Trading</strong> (connected to your broker — Tasty Trade in the video), select <strong>Iron Condor</strong>, and continue.</p>

<h3>3. Set the Ticker and Pick Your Deltas</h3>
<p>Use <strong>SPX</strong> as the underlying. To pick strikes, it helps to look at the live option chain (the video uses Tasty Trade as a visual guide). Decide on a comfortable daily range for price, then choose your <strong>short-strike delta</strong>.</p>
<p>A key idea: an option's <strong>delta is roughly its probability of finishing in the money</strong>. A 0.10 delta short strike means about a <strong>90% chance price stays out of the money</strong> on that side. With iron condors, keep your deltas <strong>symmetric</strong> (e.g. 0.10 on both the put and call side) for the most balanced range — in the example this produced a ~94% probability of profit.</p>

<h3>4. Set the Spread Width</h3>
<p>Because SPX is a large index, keep the spread width tight — the video uses a <strong>5-point width</strong>. The long options sit just beyond the shorts as protection and define your max loss. This setup risks roughly <strong>$415 to make about $75</strong> per contract before stops, so risk management matters.</p>

<h3>5. Add a VIX Filter</h3>
<p>Big moves tend to happen when volatility spikes. To avoid trading on wild days, set a <strong>maximum VIX</strong> — in the video, no new trades are taken when the <strong>VIX is above 24</strong>.</p>

<h3>6. Set the Entry Schedule and Time</h3>
<p>Configure it as a <strong>0DTE</strong> bot. The first 30 minutes after the open are often the most volatile, so the bot waits and enters around <strong>10:00 a.m. ET</strong> each trading day to capture premium with more stability.</p>

<h3>7. Set Take-Profit and Stop-Loss</h3>
<p>Because this is a high-probability, low-delta trade, the video lets it run with a <strong>100% take-profit</strong> (effectively holding toward expiration). For risk control, it uses a <strong>200% stop-loss</strong> — meaning the max loss is capped at roughly <strong>twice the credit received</strong> (e.g. an ~$80 credit caps the loss near $160, before slippage).</p>

<h3>8. Add a Force Exit</h3>
<p>To avoid holding into the final minutes, set a <strong>force exit 5 minutes before close</strong>. If neither the take-profit nor stop-loss has triggered, the bot closes the position automatically.</p>

<h3>9. Size the Position and Launch</h3>
<p>For a smaller account, keep size conservative — the video uses <strong>1 contract</strong> (about $160 of risk per contract). Review the summary, then <strong>launch</strong> the bot and toggle it <strong>On</strong>. From there it auto-trades every day until you turn it off.</p>

<h2>How to Monitor the Bot</h2>
<p>Once it's live, you can study all the <strong>analytics, positions, and logs</strong> behind the bot to see exactly how it performs over time and refine your settings.</p>

<h2>Not Ready to Go Live? Paper Trade It First</h2>
<p>If you'd rather test before risking real money, you can build the same bot as a <strong>paper trading bot</strong>. You can run as many paper bots as your plan allows, validate the strategy across real market days, and switch to live once you're confident.</p>

<h2>Build Your First Iron Condor Bot</h2>
<p>An iron condor bot is one of the simplest ways to automate a neutral, high-probability 0DTE strategy. Define your deltas, width, VIX filter, and exits once — then let the bot trade the plan for you every day.</p>


Build a live 0DTE SPX iron condor bot on OptionBots in minutes. Walkthrough covers delta selection, spread width, VIX filters, stop-loss, and entry timing.

How to Build a 0DTE SPX Iron Condor Bot on OptionBots

How to Build a 0DTE SPX Iron Condor Bot | OptionBots

Hey guys, this is Jordan with OptionBots and in this video we're going to build a 0DTE SPX trading bot. All right, you can see I've logged into my OptionBots account right here. We have a bunch of different bots on here, but what we're going to do is actually build one of our own and have it live and taking trades in our account. So we're going to go ahead and click over here. It says add trading bot and we're going to go ahead and build our own. So we're not going to use a template for this one and we're going to go ahead and give this one a name. Let's go with an S&P. And I want to think of the strategy we want to use for this one. Personally, I love trading iron condors on S&P. It's a very easy neutral strategy. Basically it just relies on the market staying flat and doing nothing. And because it's 0DTE and a lot of times the market kind of just chops around and does nothing. Of course, we have a few trend days like this, but for the most part, it's kind of like this, just kind of not doing much. I think going with an iron condor is great. So we're going to call this S&P Iron Condor bot. We'll just call it that. We're going to live trade. We're connected to my Tasty Trade account. And then we're going to click Iron Condor and then continue. All right. So now we have to kind of figure out how do we actually know what type of bot to build? What type of bot we want to use to enter trades. So first thing obviously with the ticker, we of course want to go with SPX. And now we have to figure out the delta and the spread width we want to use. All right. Now what I like to do is use Tasty Trade as a kind of guide so I can see the deltas and see the options change. I think it has a very nice layout. So we're going to go right here and we're going to type in SPX and we're going to go ahead and look at the SPX chains for today. Right. So we're filming this before the market even opens. So we can look at the ones that are expiring today, which is 0DTE, and kind of get a good sense of what type of strategies we're going to look at, right? So first thing we want to do is enter and think about what our delta is going to be, right? We have to enter our short strike delta and then also our spread width. So if we're looking at Tasty Trade here, the delta is going to be right here and right here. So we can kind of see exactly what the delta is going to look like on either side for the puts or the calls. So what I like to do is kind of look at my chart and say, okay, what kind of range do I feel comfortable with getting in an iron condor? And I kind of just zoom out and you know, this is one of the ways to do it. There's a bunch of different ways to actually build strategies and figure out how to build them. You can back test them, a lot of stuff like that. And back testing we have coming onto the platform in the next week or so. So really exciting stuff with that. But for now, let's just say, you know, if I'm looking at this and S&P right now is at 7375. We have a little bit of a gap down. So 7375 would be here. So that's kind of where the price is right now. And we've got to figure out kind of what our range wants to be. Me kind of just eyeballing it, I think around like here, basically above yesterday's high and below here seems like a pretty good range, right? I think for a daily range, if I just kind of go on the daily chart, it's pretty rare that we get a candle that's as big as something like this from this low all the way up to this high. It's pretty rare we get a candle of that size. So I think I'd be pretty comfortable with me getting a 0DTE iron condor in this range. So what I can do now is go back to Tasty Trade. I can say, okay, we have 7460 and we have 7305. So if we go to 7305, that's right here. So that's basically we'll call it a 0.1 delta right around there. And then if we go up here we have the 7460 which is going to be right here. That's a 0.05 delta. Now with iron condors I like to be very symmetric with my deltas. That's how you get kind of the best range. So if I got 0.1 on the call side that would be the 7445. Okay. Now if I take a look like this we would just move this to 7445. That to me still looks pretty good. It's pretty low probability that this loses money. In fact, if you're just using the deltas, those are actually a percentage chance that price goes in the money. So going with the 0.1 deltas, we're looking at about a 90% chance on either side that price does not go in the money, which means we have about a 90% chance plus of making money on this trade. You can see right here, probability of profit is actually 95% for this particular setup. Now, obviously, we want to add in our width. So we're going to go ahead and go with the 0.1 deltas on here. Now spread width, because we're doing S&P, I want to keep it pretty small. So we're just going to go five points, right? So we'd be buying one point above as protection and one point below as protection. And you can see our probability of profit on this trade is still 94%, which means every single day we get into this trade, there's a 94% chance it will make money statistically. Now the reason it does that is because there's a very large risk-reward, right? Meaning we're risking about $415 to make about $75. Now that's before we put in our stop loss and our take-profit. So we'll get to that in a second, but let's go with a five-point spread width. Now VIX range, I'm going to keep it as it is. Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, I don't really want to be trading this when the VIX is pretty crazy. Especially when we get some big moves. If I look at SPX, we get some pretty big range moves when the VIX gets a little bit crazy. So if we go ahead and look at the VIX here, I'm going to go and anytime this gets above, we'll call it kind of this huge spike like 24, we're not going to take a trade. So we're going to go right here. We're going to put the max in at 24. Entry schedule, we want to do 0DTE, obviously. And then entry time. Now personally, if I go back to S&P, we have a pretty wide delta, so I want to capture a lot of premium. So I really want to do this earlier in the day. And personally, I just know that in the first like 30 minutes, there's a lot of volatility. It can get a little crazy. So for me, I want to wait 30 minutes. So I'm going to go ahead and get this in at right around 10:00 a.m. All right. So 10 a.m. every day, we're going to get in this S&P and we can continue. Now it comes to take-profit and stop losses. So for this, what I really want to do is think, you know, because we have such a low delta and we're going with a very high probability trade. I really want to let this one kind of play out, right? So I'm going to go with just 100% take-profit, which is basically not really going to exit unless it expires. And with the stop loss, I want to make sure I cap my losses because again, we're putting up about $410 of capital on this trade, which is also my max loss. And I don't want to lose $400 on a trade, right? And the credit we're receiving is about 85 or 90 bucks, give or take. So for me, I want my max loss to be about two times as much. Okay? So for that, we're going to go ahead with a 200% stop loss. All right? And so basically what that means, if we get in this at a credit of let's say 0.85, or let's say 0.8, right? So $80 is how much I can make on this trade. My max loss is going to be $160. And that's before slippage and liquidity and things like that. But around $160 is how much I would lose on this trade. And for me, that's comfortable. So that's that. And then force exit. We want to get out of this with five minutes before close. Personally, I just don't like holding things within the last few minutes. So if the take-profit or the stop loss doesn't hit, it's going to close out of the position within five minutes before this expires. We can go ahead and hit continue. Now risk. Again, I'm running let's say a small account, so I want to keep this pretty small. Again, we're risking about $160 per contract. So I'm going to go ahead and just do one contract. Keep it really simple. And then hit continue. And there we go. So we have our SPX Iron Condor bot. It's an iron condor on SPX with a 0.1 delta, spread width of five. So it would look something similar to this trade right here. You can see it looks pretty solid. And if we go back and check just to make sure everything looks good, the VIX between 1 and 24. Entry time is at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. We get in every day, 100% take-profit, 200% stop-loss, 5 minute force exit before close, and it's connected to my live Tasty Trade account. We're going to go ahead and launch that. And boom. Just like that, we now have the bot ready. All we have to do is go right here and turn this on. And just like that, this will auto trade for me every single day until I decide to go ahead and turn it off. And we can study all the analytics, all the positions, all the logs behind it. So we can see exactly how this bot is performing over time. And if you're someone who wants to try out this platform but you're not quite ready to go live, you can also do this with a paper trading bot. You can set up as many bots as you want to paper trade, depending on the plan you're on, and go ahead and test your bots. You can see I have a lot of different paper bots that I'm testing right now before I go ahead and turn them live. But there we go. We have it. And this was about an eight to nine minute video and we fully got it done and ready. Obviously, you can be a lot faster if I'm not making a video around it. But if you guys want to kind of give this a shot and test out our platform and become an automated trader instead of trading manually, then go ahead and hit the link in the description. And with that being said, guys, I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in the next video.


<h2>What Is Paper Trading on OptionBots?</h2>
<p>Paper trading lets you run a fully automated options bot using <strong>simulated capital instead of real money</strong>. On OptionBots, every account starts out with roughly <strong>$500,000 in paper-trading capital</strong>, and you don't need to connect a brokerage to use it. You can simply sign up and start testing as many bots as you want.</p>
<p>The reason for that large starting balance is simple: we want you to have enough simulated capital to deploy a variety of strategies, run them at realistic size, and discover which types of bots actually work for your style — all before a single dollar of real money is ever at risk.</p>

<h2>Why Paper Trade Before Going Live?</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Zero financial risk.</strong> Nothing is connected to a broker, so you can experiment freely.</li>
<li><strong>Validate a strategy.</strong> See how an iron butterfly, credit spread, or 0DTE bot behaves across real market days.</li>
<li><strong>Learn the platform.</strong> Get comfortable with bot settings, entries, exits, and risk controls.</li>
<li><strong>Build confidence.</strong> Watch the bot manage trades on its own before you trust it with live funds.</li>
</ul>

<h2>How to Set Up a Paper Trading Bot (Step by Step)</h2>
<p>Here's the exact workflow from the video — building a 0DTE iron butterfly paper bot from scratch.</p>

<h3>1. Add a Trading Bot</h3>
<p>From your dashboard, click <strong>Add a Trading Bot</strong>. You can start from one of the built-in templates, or build one from scratch. In this walkthrough we'll build from scratch so you can see the whole process.</p>

<h3>2. Name It and Switch to Paper Trading</h3>
<p>Give the bot a name — for example, <em>"Paper Iron Butterfly Bot 1."</em> Then change the mode from <strong>Live Trading</strong> to <strong>Paper Trading</strong>. This is the single most important setting: it ensures the bot trades with simulated capital only.</p>

<h3>3. Choose Your Strategy</h3>
<p>Select the strategy you want to trade. In this example we choose an <strong>iron butterfly</strong>, then continue.</p>

<h3>4. Configure the Underlying and Strikes</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Underlying:</strong> QQQ (the "Q's").</li>
<li><strong>Short strike delta:</strong> 0.5 (an at-the-money body for the iron butterfly).</li>
<li><strong>Wing selection:</strong> by width — a <strong>2-point width</strong>, so the long options sit two strikes away from the short strikes.</li>
<li><strong>VIX range:</strong> left blank for this bot (no volatility filter).</li>
</ul>

<h3>5. Set Your Entry Time and Schedule</h3>
<p>Configure a <strong>0DTE (zero-days-to-expiration) bot</strong> that enters every morning at <strong>10:00 a.m. ET</strong>, every trading day. You can leave the advanced settings at their defaults — in the video we choose to <strong>skip CPI days</strong> to avoid trading into that economic release.</p>

<h3>6. Set Your Profit Target and Stop Loss</h3>
<p>Keep it simple with a <strong>50% take-profit</strong> and a <strong>50% stop-loss</strong> — a clean 1:1 risk-reward ratio.</p>

<h3>7. Set Your Exit Rules</h3>
<p>To avoid holding into the close, set a <strong>"close before exit"</strong> of 5 minutes. If neither the take-profit nor the stop-loss has triggered, the bot closes the position within five minutes of the close — around <strong>3:55 p.m. ET</strong>.</p>

<h3>8. Set Position Size and Launch</h3>
<p>Because this is paper trading with plenty of capital, you can size up — in the video we use <strong>12 contracts</strong>. Review the summary to make sure everything looks correct, then <strong>launch the bot</strong>.</p>

<h3>9. Turn the Bot On</h3>
<p>After launching, flip the bot to <strong>On</strong>. It now appears at the top of your bots list (e.g., "Paper Iron Butterfly Bot 1") and will keep paper trading for as long as it stays on. Since it isn't connected to a broker, no real money is ever on the line.</p>

<h2>How to Review Your Paper Trading Results</h2>
<p>Your paper bots behave just like live ones. Open any bot — including the built-in templates like the "Flutter" — and you'll see the full trade history: <strong>entries, exits, P&amp;L, exit reasons, credits</strong>, and everything else you'd expect from a live broker. You can also open the <strong>log</strong> to see exactly what the bot did, step by step.</p>

<h2>How Realistic Are Paper Fills?</h2>
<p>Everything mirrors a live trade except the fills. OptionBots tries to <strong>match paper fills as closely as possible to real market prices</strong> to simulate live conditions — but remember it is still simulated trading, so treat the results as a realistic guide rather than a guarantee.</p>

<h2>Start Paper Trading Today</h2>
<p>Paper trading is the fastest, safest way to learn automated options trading and find an edge before risking real capital. If you're new, sign up, claim your free paper-trading capital, and launch your first bot in minutes.</p>


Learn how to set up a paper trading bot on OptionBots with $500,000 in free paper capital — no broker needed. Build a 0DTE iron butterfly bot from scratch in minutes.

How to Set Up a Paper Trading Bot on OptionBots

How to Set Up a Paper Trading Bot on OptionBots | Step-by-Step

Hey guys, this is Jordan with OptionBots and in this video, we're going to show you how to set up a paper trading bot in our platform. So, if you see on the homepage here, everyone starts out with about $500,000 of paper trading capital. Now, this is all not connected to a broker. You don't even have to connect your broker if you want to use this. You can simply sign up and test all your bots with paper trading beforehand. and we give you 500,000 because we want you to be able to test as much as you want, have as much capital to deploy and really see what type of bot work for you. Now, if you want to set up a bot, all you have to do is go ahead and add a trading bot. Now, you can go ahead and use one of our templates like so. I'm going to go ahead and build one from scratch so you can kind of see the whole process. So, first thing we're going to do is give it a name. So, we can call it a paper iron butterfly bot just like that. We'll call it paper iron butterfly bot one. So we can go ahead and change this right here from live trading to say paper trading. And then all we have to do is hit the strategy we want to trade, which in this case would be an iron butterfly, and then continue. So let's say we want to do it on the Q's. We want the short strike delta to be 0.5. And we want the wing selection to be by width. So let's say on Q's, we're doing just a two point width of our strikes. So, every time we're shorting at the 0.5 delta, the ones we're buying are going to be two strikes apart. VIX range, let's keep it blank for now. We don't really care about the VIX. And let's say we want to do a zero DTE bot that gets in every morning at we'll go 10:00 a.m. Okay, keep it very simple. We're going to do this every single day. And we can leave all the advanced settings the same. Actually, we're going to skip CPI days. We don't really need that. We're going to continue. Let's go with a very simple 50% take-profit. Let's go with a 50% stop-loss. So, nice even 1:1 risk-reward ratio. And we don't want to hold any of this into close. So, we're just going to do a 5 minute close before exit. Which basically means if the take-profit or the stop loss hasn't hit, we're going to close this bot within 5 minutes of the day. So, 3:55 p.m. Eastern time. We can go ahead and continue. And because we're paper trading, let's go ahead and go with like 12 different contracts because we have the capital to do so. And then continue. Make sure everything here looks all good. And then we're going to launch that bot. And here we go. That's all it took for us to build and create a paper trading bot. All I have to do is right here is turn this on like so. And there we go. It is now live and running. And if I go back to my bots over here, you're going to see right here at the very top, paper iron butterfly bot one right here, and it is turned on. So, this is going to continue to paper trade for me as long as I have it on. Again, it's not connected to the broker. This is all paper trading. So, not risking any real money on the line for this particular bot. And you can see that there's a few other different paper trading bots that we've done. This is the test account we're using. So, we're doing a bunch of different tests on this one. But you can see, for example, if we look at this one here, this Flutter, this is one of the templates that we have available inside the actual platform. And this is paper trading. You can see actually all the entries, the exits, the P&Ls, you can see the exit reason, the credits, everything that goes on just like a normal trade with a live broker would. Everything is the same obviously except for the fills. They're going to be slightly different, but we try and close them or match them as closely as possible to simulate real live funds. Although it is still obviously paper trading. You can see the log as well and see everything that happened with this particular paper trading bot and see kind of how that works. So, I hope you guys did enjoy this video. If you're new and you want to give OptionBots a try, you can go ahead and do so with the link in the description. I'll see you all in the next video.

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