Strategies Overview

A strategy is a set of rules that runs continuously and acts on its own — deciding when to open trades, and managing your book while it does. If a template is the blueprint for a single trade, a strategy is the always-on decision-maker that puts those trades on for you: it watches the market and your positions and, when its conditions are met, takes an action — most often opening a template. In the app's own words, a strategy groups rules and owns the trades they open.

That's the division of labor across VolNinja's automation:

• A template defines what a trade is and how it manages itself once open (its legs, management rules, and standing orders).
• A strategy decides when and whether to open trades across your whole book, automatically.

Finding your strategies

Open Automation → Strategies from the top navigation. The page has a New Strategy button and three tabs:

• Strategies — your list of strategies (shown here).
• Global Variables — values shared across strategies; see Strategy Variables.
• Event Log — a running record of what your strategies have done.

Reading a strategy card

Each strategy shows as a card:

• Name — click it (or the pencil) to open the strategy and edit it.
• priority — a badge showing where it sits in the running order (see Priority below).
• Paper and Live switches — turn the strategy on or off for each account, independently.
• Edit (pencil) and Delete (trash).

Deleting asks you to confirm, and it's safe for anything already trading: as the dialog notes, it removes the strategy and its rules, but open trades keep running under their own per-trade template rules.

Turning a strategy on — Paper and Live are separate

A strategy isn't running until you switch it on, and it runs per account. Flipping Paper starts it against your paper account; flipping Live starts it against your real one. The two are independent, so you can prove a strategy out in paper for as long as you like before it ever touches real money.

What's inside a strategy

Opening a strategy (its name or the pencil) brings up the Create / Edit Strategy sheet. It starts with Basic Information — the Name, a Priority (lower runs first), an optional Description, and the Enabled switches for Paper and Live:

Below that, the same sheet is where you build everything the strategy does. Each part has its own article:

• Rules — the conditions and actions that drive the strategy. They use the shared rules & conditions model; see Strategy Rules.
• Variables — values the strategy defines and maintains, plus shared globals; see Strategy Variables.
• Actions & runtime — what a rule actually does when it fires, and how to watch a running strategy; see Actions & Runtime.

How strategies orchestrate templates

The link between the two layers is a strategy's actions. A strategy rule's action can open a template — and that's the heart of the orchestration: the strategy decides the moment to enter, while the template supplies the trade and everything that manages it afterward. You can point one strategy at several templates and let its rules choose which to open, so a single strategy can run a whole playbook of setups. See Templates Overview for the trade side of that partnership.

Priority

When more than one strategy could act at the same moment, priority sets the order — lower runs first. Give the strategies you want considered earliest the lower numbers. Priority is shown on each card and set in the strategy's Basic Information.

Watching them run

A running strategy works in the background, but you're never in the dark about it:

• The Event Log tab records what your strategies have done and why.
• Your Dashboard surfaces running strategies, where you can open a strategy's live runtime view to see its current state and recent activity.

For a full tour of the runtime view and the event log, see Actions & Runtime; for a start-to-finish walkthrough of putting a strategy to work, see Running a Strategy.