Templates Overview

A template is a reusable blueprint for a trade. It holds the trade's legs — what to buy or sell and how the strikes are chosen — together with the rules that open and manage it. Build a template once and you can put the same trade on again and again: run it yourself in a couple of clicks, or let a strategy run it automatically on your behalf.

This article is the tour of the Templates screen — where your templates live and what you can do with each one. The details of building one are covered in the articles it links to.

Finding your templates

Open Automation → Templates from the top navigation. The page lists everything you've built under a single Active Templates card, with a New Template button at the top right to start a fresh one.

Reading the list

Each template shows as a row (or, on a phone, a card) with everything you need to recognize it at a glance:

• ★ Favorite — the star at the start of the row. Click it to mark a template as a favorite; click again to unmark.
• Name — what you called it.
• Root and Underlying — the instrument the template trades.
• Legs — how many legs the trade has (a single option, a two-leg spread, a four-leg condor, and so on).
• Status — an Enabled or Disabled badge. Click it to flip the template on or off.

What you can do from a template

Every row carries the same set of actions:

• Execute (the ▶ button) — execute the template now to open a position. Disabled unless the template is Enabled.
• Edit (pencil) — open the template to change its legs or rules.
• Clone (copy) — duplicate the template as a starting point for a variation, leaving the original untouched.
• Delete (trash) — remove the template. You'll be asked to confirm first. This is always safe: each open position keeps its own copy of the template it was opened from, so deleting a template never touches your existing positions or their rules — you simply can't execute it again to open new ones.

Executing a template

Click a template's Execute button (the ▶) and VolNinja shows an Execute Template confirmation before anything happens. It lays out exactly what will be placed — the template name, its legs (each shown as buy/sell, quantity, call or put, how the strike is chosen, and days to expiry) — and a Multiplier that scales all leg quantities at once, so you can put on two, three, or ten times the base size without editing the template.

Nothing is sent until you press Execute. Cancel and the template is untouched.

Enable and disable

The Status badge is a switch. A Disabled template can't be executed and won't be run by a strategy — a handy way to park a template you're still tuning without deleting it. Flip it back to Enabled when it's ready to trade.

Favorites

Marking a template with the star makes it a favorite, which puts it within one click across the app:

• On your Dashboard, favorites fill the Quick Execute card — you can execute any of them right there in one click, without ever opening the Templates page.
• In the Risk Lab, favorites are the templates you can add to a what-if scenario to test a hypothetical trade before you place it.

You can also group favorites into named categories so a large collection stays organized in Quick Execute. Star the handful of setups you reach for most, and leave the rest unstarred to keep the quick surfaces uncluttered.

How templates feed strategies

A template on its own is something you run by hand. A strategy is what makes it automatic: a strategy watches the market and your positions and, when its own rules say so, opens the templates you've given it — no clicking required. The same enabled template you can execute here is the building block a strategy puts to work. See Strategies Overview for how that orchestration fits together.

What's inside a template

A template has two parts, each with its own article:

• Legs — the options the trade is made of, and how each strike is selected. See Template Legs.
• Rules — how the template opens, manages, and exits its positions. These are built on the shared rules & conditions model and split across Entry Execution, Management Rules, and Standing Orders.

New to templates? The quickest way in is the walkthrough in Building a Template, which puts all of this together step by step.