See exactly how the software works

A signal source is just "where this strategy gets its trade ideas from." Every automated strategy you run is subscribed to exactly one source.

The kinds of sources

When you pick a source for a strategy, you'll see a dropdown of choices. They generally fall into one of these flavors:

• A built-in alert channel — alerts produced by us. The ones you'll see most often are Dope Spreads (our in-house spread-trading channel), Signal-Hub (a generic alert pipeline that hosts a growing collection of strategies), and Smart (a built-in strategy that watches unusual options activity on SPY and QQQ and generates its own alerts).
• A marketplace subscription — alerts produced by another strategy you subscribed to from the Marketplace page.
• All sources combined — the strategy reacts to alerts from every source you have access to.
• Bring your own — the strategy listens to alerts you send in yourself from an external tool.
• None / manual-only — the strategy never takes automated alerts. It only runs when you place an entry by hand through the Hybrid Trade page.

Entry-only vs entry+exit sources

Not every source publishes the same kind of alert. There are two shapes:

• Entry+Exit — the source publishes both the trade idea and an explicit exit when the trade is done. The trade has a clean win/loss outcome the moment it closes. Dope Spreads works this way.
• Entry-Only — the source publishes the trade idea but never publishes a formal exit. The trade is open-ended; whether it's a win or a loss is up to you to decide. This is where the Min Win % threshold on the Marketplace detail page comes in — it lets you set the bar that tells the portal what counts as a winner on an entry-only source.

Example

An entry-only source publishes "buy SPY 450 Call at $1.00." It never publishes an exit. You set Min Win % to 25% on that source's Marketplace detail page. From that point on, any historical trade that touched at least +25% counts as a WIN, anything that didn't is a LOSS, and trades that are still open are tagged POTENTIAL.

Picking the right one

Every strategy on your account can have a different source. That's the whole point: one strategy might run a conservative ruleset on day-trade alerts, another might run an aggressive ruleset on swing-trend alerts.

Tip

If you're not sure what a particular source looks like, point a strategy at it but leave the strategy disabled. Watch the alerts feed for a few days. Once you understand the rhythm — how many alerts, what kind, when — then turn the strategy on.