How to research a strategy

Every strategy begins as a question: What if I sold a put spread every morning and closed it by lunch? What if I bought a straddle only on high-VIX days? You don't need to be precise yet — just a structure and a rule for when to enter and exit.

Encode the idea with a structured form — pick a template, set the legs, define entry and exit. As you build, a results panel shows how the exact configuration you've assembled would have performed across every trading session, computed under identical conditions so any two strategies are directly comparable. Total return, Sharpe, max drawdown, win rate, an equity curve against an SPX benchmark — the whole picture, before you've risked anything.

This is the fastest way to kill a bad idea and to find the few that hold up. If a strategy looks strong here, it earns a closer look.

Numbers across hundreds of days tell you whether an edge exists; they don't show you how it feels to trade. Practice closes that gap: open any trading day, scrub the clock forward and back, and place the trades yourself on the real option chain — watching positions mark-to-market, pending orders fill, and the day settle at the close.

Trade a handful of the strategy's best and worst days by hand. You'll see the slippage and the moments of doubt, and you'll watch a limit order sit there waiting — a backtest fills on the same terms as a live order does, at your price and only after the market has held there for three seconds (no wait at all if you reached past the market, which fills at the market you crossed), so an idea that only works on prices the market touched for an instant never looked good in the first place. Practice is fully editable — each trading day is a one-click $100,000 sandbox you can open in any order and revise as you learn.

Once a strategy is proven and rehearsed, the next step is to let it run on its own. A bot executes a saved strategy against the live session without you at the keyboard, with its own risk policy and a continuous balance — the natural bridge from researching an idea to trading it at scale. Create one in the app or over the Bots API; it is the final rung of the Research ladder.

When you're ready to take the idea into the market's clock, move to live trading. A live account paper-trades today's session in real time against the live tick stream, with a balance that carries forward day to day like a real brokerage. The same chain, the same engine, the same settlement — only now the clock isn't yours.