Inside Trade Builder: The Fastest Way to Find The Right Options For YOU

By Mike Burnick

When I started trading in the 1980s, the only AI I knew about was in the Terminator movies. Today it runs the stock market.  

And even humans are trading 24/7 online. Yep…it’s now possible to trade stocks in the middle of the night if you desire. Not for me personally, but a real benefit for insomniac investors.  

One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is that trends play out much faster these days.  

Fortunately, we also have far more data available that TradeSmith can use to point us to the best opportunities. Especially in options…which have really boomed in popularity. 

For option traders there are more ways to make leveraged bets these days. That includes the explosive growth in zero-days-to-expiry (0DTE) options, which suddenly account for nearly half of all retail options volume: 

Some of these innovative trading tools should carry a warning label like a pack of cigarettes, because they can be hazardous to your wealth. 

But not every change has been for the worse.  

In the ‘80s, options trading required scrolling through mountains of raw data and running your own calculations on strike prices and expiration dates – or with the help of a crude spreadsheet. 

So, options were really just the playground of Wall Street pros. Computing your odds of success wasn’t easy for most folks, who simply didn’t have the time or energy to get it right.  

But today that’s all changed. AI may not be perfect, but it’s revolutionized trading by making it more accessible to everyone. 

Introducing Trade Builder 

Our TradeSmith tool makes options not only quicker to analyze – but also very easy to find the right trade for you. It’s called Trade Builder, and subscribers can access it from the Option360 main menu, as shown below. 

Please Note: If you don’t see this in your TradeSmith Finance dashboard, and would like to, please call our dedicated Customer Care team at 866-220-1107 to find out how to get access. 

You simply pick the underlying stock and select your outlook, time frame, and trading preferences. Then just click Build Trade, and our Trade Builder program does all the calculations for you. 

The result is a suggested option strategy in full detail – right down to the option type, strike price, and expiration date. Trade Builder even shows you the full risk/reward profile in advance, before you place the trade. 

As an example of how it works, let’s take a closer look at Nvidia (NVDA), perhaps the most popular stock in today’s AI-driven market. 

Using Trade Builder, you just make a few easy selections.  

Let’s say you have a bullish outlook on NVDA over an intermediate time frame, and you personally have a moderate tolerance for risk.  

As you can see above, Trade Builder gives you multiple choices, including: 

  • Ticker symbol: Pick the stock you want to trade. 
  • Outlook: Choose from very bullish, bullish, neutral, bearish, or very bearish. 
  • Time: Select short term (less than one month), intermediate term (one to three months), or long term (anything longer than a month). 
  • Risk: Choose your desired risk level: conservative, moderate, or aggressive.  

Trade Builder combines your preferences and builds an exact trade for that stock based on our proven Options360 algorithms. 

It then considers multiple factors when arriving at a potential trade solution. Notice that you get to choose from 45 possible combinations (5 outlook choices x 3 time frames x 3 risk selections).  

The system also checks the stock’s current volatility against our extensive database to refine the trade, adding another layer of analysis to refine each combination and pinpoint the best fit. 

In all, Trade Builder carefully analyzes 135 potential scenarios. 

Not every scenario leads to a trade suggestion. Roughly one out of six times, Trade Builder tells you there’s no strong trade to recommend right now. That keeps you away from trades that don’t fit the data. 

When Trade Builder does suggest a trade, it selects from 10 strategy types, ranging from a simple call or put option to spread trades that help limit your risk.  

A Closer Look at NVDA 

Let’s take a look at what Trade Builder suggests for NVDA right now. In this case, it suggests a credit spread trade: 

As you can see here, Trade Builder gives you all the details you need to consider the trade and act on it with a high degree of confidence. 

And these spreads are much easier to place with your broker than they may sound if you’re new to it. 

It simply involves selling an out-of-the-money put option on NVDA while at the same time buying another put option at a lower strike price with the same expiration date.  

In this case: 

In a spread trade like this, the option you sell pays you immediate premium income, while the lower-strike price option you buy helps to reduce your downside risk. 

Trade Builder provides a comprehensive trade overview, as you see below – and this spread trade has an 82% POP, or Probability of Profit:  

You also have an 80% probability of earning the max profit of $127. That’s the option premium you collect upfront when placing the trade. 

Trade Builder gives you even more details about the underlying stock itself, NVDA. Plus, a detailed profit/loss graph so you can see potential scenarios upfront, with nothing left to chance.  

We also display specific, backtested data on how well this type of option trade has performed in the past.  

In this case, put spread trades similar to this one have a 93.9% win rate in our backtest, with a 4.03% return on risk. That’s across a sample of more than 2,200 similar trades. 

Mike Burnick’s Bottom Line: Bring your own view on any asset, and Trade Builder finds the trade that best fits it. It starts with a view you already have – a stock you select and your outlook on it. Just add your time frame and your comfort with risk. Trade Builder takes it from there, turning your preferences into an actionable option trade backed by the power of Options360’s extensive database.  

Good Investing,  

Mike Burnick 

Senior Analyst, TradeSmith 

P.S. Now that you’ve seen how Trade Builder turns your own view into a precise options trade, there’s another AI breakthrough the team unveiled earlier this week that I think you’re really going to like. One built to get you ahead of major news before it reaches the public. 

The fastest, biggest gains happen right when those news events hit – but by then it’s too late. The smart money has already cashed in and left everyone else the scraps.  

Only now, TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan and his team have built a new AI model to level the playing field for everyday investors like us. Every morning before the open, their Smart Money Edge flags stocks showing unusual “smart money” activity – the names most likely to see a major catalyst in the next 30 days. 

In backtesting, that pattern pointed to gains of 536%, 635%, and even 1,029% in about 30 days or less. 

If you missed Keith’s announcement, it’s worth catching the replay. 

Click here to watch it and claim your daily list of trades before it’s too late.