Running a Strategy

A template opens one trade when you run it. A strategy goes a step further: it's a standing set of rules that watches the market for you and decides on its own when to open and close trades — across all your templates — without you clicking anything. Once you enable it, it just runs.

Where a template's own rules only manage the single position it opened, a strategy sits above your templates: it can open a trade from a template when its conditions line up, then close positions when they change.

When a strategy opens a trade from a template, the new position gets its own copy of that template's management rules and standing orders — a snapshot taken the moment it opens. From then on the position manages itself with those rules, independent of the strategy and of any later edits to the template. So even if you pause, edit, or delete the strategy afterwards, the trades it already opened carry on managing and protecting themselves exactly as they were born to.

What a strategy is made of

A strategy is a name, a priority, and a list of rules. Each rule is a condition paired with an action — the same condition→action model used everywhere in VolNinja (see Rules & conditions). A strategy's actions are what let it trade for you:

• Open a template — run one of your templates to open a new trade.
• Close positions — close matching open positions.
• Set a variable — remember something (a count, a flag, a level) to use in later conditions.

So a strategy can express things a single template can't: "open my iron condor at 10:00 if the market is quiet, but only once a day, and close everything by 3:30." Rules, variables, and actions each have their own article — see Strategy rules, Strategy variables, and Actions & runtime. This article is about the lifecycle: creating one, starting it, watching it, and stopping it.

Create a strategy

Open the Strategies screen and click New Strategy. In the Create Strategy sheet, fill in Basic Information:

• Name — what you'll recognize it by.
• Priority (lower runs first) — when more than one strategy could act at the same moment, the lower number goes first.
• Description (optional) — a note on what it does.

Click Create Strategy. A fresh strategy has no rules yet — as the sheet reminds you, you enable it and add its rules and variables after creating it. Open it again with the Edit (pencil) button to build out those rules.

Start it running

A strategy runs the moment you enable it — there's no separate start button. Each strategy card on the Strategies screen has two switches, Paper and Live:

• Turn on Paper and the strategy begins running against your Interactive Brokers paper account.
• Turn on Live and it runs on your real account, with real money.

These two switches are independent — a strategy can run in Paper, in Live, in both, or neither. Crucially, they are not governed by the Paper/LIVE switch in the header. That header switch changes what you're viewing and where your manual actions go; a strategy's own Live toggle is what actually puts it on real money, and it keeps running in the background whatever your header is set to. This is the single most important thing to understand about strategies — see Paper vs live.

Watch it run

Your Dashboard has a collapsible Strategies card showing how many are running in your current mode. Expand it to see each strategy with a pause/resume switch, and click any row to open its runtime view.

The runtime sheet is read-only and updates on its own:

• Information — the strategy's status (its priority, whether Paper and Live are on or off, and a switch to pause or resume it in the mode you're viewing), plus the live values of its variables and aggregates.
• Rules — the rules as they stand, so you can see what it's watching for.
• Events — a running log of what this strategy has done.

For the whole picture across every strategy, the Strategies screen also has an Event Log tab and a Global Variables tab.

Pause, resume, or remove

• Pause a strategy by turning off its switch for that mode — on its card, on the Dashboard card, or in the runtime view. It stops acting immediately in that mode; the other mode is unaffected.
• Resume by turning the switch back on.
• Delete a strategy with the trash icon on its card. You'll be asked to confirm. Any trades it already opened keep running under the rules they were opened with — the snapshot each position carries from its template — so deleting the strategy doesn't close them.

For more depth on each piece, continue with Strategies overview. To have automation only manage one position rather than trade across templates, see Automating exits & management instead.