The Marketplace is where you browse and subscribe to additional alert sources. Each listing in the marketplace is a strategy run by someone else (or by us) that publishes trade ideas you can plug into your own bot.

Browsing

The marketplace shows each available strategy with a short description and stats so you can decide whether to subscribe. You're not committing to anything until you click subscribe.

Card view vs. List view

At the right of the Available Strategies heading is a Cards / List toggle that changes how the listings are laid out. Everything you can do is available either way — pick whichever reads better for you.

• Cards (the default) gives each strategy a full tile with its description, subscriber count, signal type, and price all on display. Best for reading about a strategy you haven't seen before.
• List puts each strategy on a single compact row — name, author, type, subscribers, and price lined up in columns like a table — so you can compare a lot of listings at a glance. The description blurb is the one thing left out; open the strategy to read it.

Clicking a row does the same thing as clicking a card: it opens that strategy's detail page. The Subscribe, Unsubscribe, and Edit buttons sit at the end of each row and work exactly as they do on a card.

The app remembers which view you picked on this device, so if you prefer List it'll still be List next time. This is remembered separately from the Live Trades and Copy Trade pages, which have their own Cards / List toggles — choosing List here doesn't change those. On a phone the rows stack neatly with a label on each value, so there's never any sideways scrolling.

Example

You're deciding between three paid strategies. Switch to List, and their prices and subscriber counts line up in two columns you can read straight down — much quicker than scrolling between three cards to compare $50/mo at 128 subscribers against $120/mo at 7.

Subscribing

Clicking Subscribe asks you to confirm. After you confirm, that strategy becomes available as an alert source the next time you open the Strategies (or Trading Settings) page — you can then point one of your bots at it.

Promo codes

Strategy authors sometimes hand out a promo code — usually to give new subscribers their first month free. If you have one, the checkout window for a paid strategy has a Promo code box just above the PayPal button.

Type the code in and click Apply. If it's good, the box turns into a tag showing the code and what it gets you, and the wording above updates to spell out exactly what you'll pay and when. Changed your mind? Click Remove and you're back to the normal price.

Two things worth knowing before you click the PayPal button:

• PayPal repeats the offer on its own screen. When you get to PayPal you should see something like "Free for 1 month, then $120.00 USD monthly." That's your confirmation the discount actually attached to the subscription — not just to the page you were looking at.
• A free first month means you pay nothing today. Your card or PayPal balance isn't charged at signup. The first real charge happens on the date shown in the checkout window, and if you cancel before that date you are never charged at all.

Example

Dope Investing gives you a code for his Dope Spreads strategy. You click Subscribe, type the code, and hit Apply. The tag reads FIRST MONTH FREE and the line above changes to "$0.00 due today — your first month is free. Starting September 11, 2026, you'll be billed $120.00/mo until you cancel." PayPal's screen says "Free for 1 month, then $120.00 USD monthly." You pay $0.00 now, and $120 on September 11.

A few rules that catch people out:

• A code is tied to one strategy. Dope's code works on Dope Spreads and nowhere else. Trying it on another listing tells you it's for a different strategy.
• Codes are for new subscribers. If you've subscribed to that strategy before — even if you cancelled a while back — the code won't apply. You can still subscribe at the normal price.
• One use per person. That includes your other accounts if you run more than one (see below).
• Sales-site codes are a different thing. A code from a StaxInvesting plan promotion won't work on a marketplace strategy, and vice versa.

If a code doesn't take, you'll see a short note explaining why, and the PayPal button stays right where it is at the normal price — a bad code never blocks you from subscribing.

Once you've subscribed, the code you used is listed on your Billing page alongside that strategy.

If you own more than one account

Some people run more than one account with us — a live account and a paper account, or two live accounts side by side. If that's you, a subscription follows you, not one dashboard.

Subscribe to a paid strategy on any of your accounts and every account you own gets it. You pay once. You don't subscribe again on the other one, and you're never billed twice for the same strategy.

The bill itself lives on the account you bought it from. That's the account whose Billing page shows the price, the next billing date, and the payment history, and it's the only one that can cancel. Your other accounts list the strategy too, marked Another account with a short note saying it's already covered — use Switching Between Your Accounts to hop over to the paying account if you want to cancel.

Free strategies work per account: subscribe to them on each dashboard where you want them. It's one click and costs nothing. Unsubscribing from a free strategy only removes it from the account you're on, which is handy if you want it running live but not on your paper account.

Example

You have a live account and a paper account, and you subscribe to a $50/month strategy from the live one. Both accounts can now trade its alerts. Your live account's Billing page shows the $50 charge with a Cancel button; your paper account shows the same strategy tagged Another account, with no charge and no Cancel button.

Note

Accounts are linked automatically when they share an email address or were set up together. If you own a second account that didn't pick up a paid strategy — usually because it was set up under a different email address — contact support and we'll link them for you.

Unsubscribing

If you decide a strategy isn't for you, find it in the marketplace and click Unsubscribe. Its alerts stop reaching your bot right away — you don't need to restart anything, and any bot still pointed at that source simply stops taking new trades from it.

Warning

Unsubscribe when you're flat, not while a trade from that strategy is still open. Exit alerts come down the same pipe as entry alerts, so if you unsubscribe mid-trade you won't receive the exit — leaving that position for you to close yourself from the dashboard. Check for open trades from the strategy first, or use Manual Close vs Flatten All to close them out before unsubscribing.

If a bot is left pointed at a source you've unsubscribed from, it stays on your Strategies page but stops trading. Pick a new signal source for it, or turn it off.

What subscribing does (and doesn't do)

• It does make the strategy's alerts available to your bot.
• It does not automatically start trading them — you still have to attach the source to one of your strategies and turn that strategy on.
• It does not charge you extra (unless the listing itself is a paid subscription, in which case the listing will tell you so up front).
• If the listing is a paid one, it does apply to every account you own, not just the one you're looking at. See If you own more than one account above.
• If the paid listing has a private Discord alert channel, it does get you into it — but only once you've connected your Discord account. See Discord Alert Access.

Tip

A new subscription is a great candidate for a backtest before you flip it on live. Subscribe, run a backtest against its historical alerts, and let the past results inform your decision.

If you publish a strategy of your own

Any listing you own is tagged YOURS in the marketplace and carries an Edit button, so you can change its name, description, and price yourself. See Managing Your Strategy Listing.

Opening a strategy detail page

Click any strategy in the marketplace list to open its detail page. This is where you research a strategy in depth before subscribing — and revisit it after you've subscribed to keep tabs on how it's been doing.

The detail page is built around three areas:

Stats cards at the top summarize the strategy's track record:

• Win Rate — percentage of historical alerts that closed profitably.
• Total P&L — running total over the period the page is showing.
• Profit Factor — dollars made per dollar lost.
• Avg Win and Avg Loss — typical size of a winner and a loser.
• Best Trade and Worst Trade.
• Win Streak and Loss Streak — longest consecutive runs.
• Total Trades — how many alerts the strategy has published.

Equity curve — a chart of the strategy's cumulative P&L over time. The curve reacts to the inputs described below, so the same strategy can look different depending on how you would have traded it.

Trade history — every alert the strategy has ever published, split into two sections:

• Open Positions — alerts that haven't closed yet, with live prices, session high/low, and a running P&L %.
• Historical — the full closed-trade log with entry, exit, days-to-expiration (DTE), and an outcome pill.

Click any spread-type pill to expand a row and see the per-leg breakdown — same convention as the rest of the portal.

Paper-traded history

A few strategies were forward-tested on a paper trading account before their author started trading them with real money, and that early stretch is included in the track record so you can see the whole story. Those trades are tagged with a pink PAPER pill next to their WIN or LOSS, and a note above the stats cards tells you how many there are and the date real-money trading began.

The signals and the option prices in a paper stretch are real — what's missing is a real broker filling the order. In live trading you can get a slightly worse price than the one you saw, so treat a paper-heavy record as a promising sign rather than a finished one, and give more weight to the trades taken after the author went live.

Example

A strategy shows 26 trades. The banner reads "21 of the 26 trades below are marked PAPER… Live broker execution began Jul 20, 2026." That tells you the last handful of trades are the real-money ones — worth scrolling to before you subscribe.

Strategies that sell options (credit strategies)

Some strategies make money by selling options instead of buying them — think credit spreads, iron condors, or selling a call or put outright. For these, the trader collects money up front (the credit) and profits by buying the position back for less than they collected.

That flips what "good" looks like on the price: the price going DOWN is the win. The detail page knows this and scores every trade from the seller's side, so the P&L, win/loss pills, and best/worst numbers always reflect what the strategy actually made.

Example

A strategy sells a SOFI call for $0.40 and later buys it back for $0.07. The option's price fell — and that's a win of $33 per contract, because the seller kept most of the $40 credit they collected up front.

The WHEEL pill

Some credit strategies deliberately let a position get assigned rather than closing it — a cash-secured put that turns into owned shares, or a covered call that gets the shares called away. Those trades show a blue WHEEL pill instead of WIN or LOSS, because neither word really fits: nothing went wrong, the trade just finished by converting into stock. See Allow Wheel for how that works and how to opt in or out.

The P&L shown on a WHEEL row is the option premium only — what the strategy collected for selling the contract. What happened to the shares afterwards isn't part of an options track record, so it isn't counted here either way. That cuts both directions: you won't see the profit from stock that got called away at a gain, and you won't see a scary five-figure "loss" for shares the strategy simply took delivery of and still owns.

Example

A strategy sells a BULL $5.50 covered call for $0.18 and the shares get called away. The row shows WHEEL with a $18 gain — the premium collected. The $550 the trader made on the shares themselves lives in their stock account, not in this strategy's option record.

Note

If you're comparing a wheel-heavy strategy against a pure spread strategy, keep this in mind — the wheel strategy's totals here understate what its author actually made, because the share leg is deliberately left out.

Max Capital Per Trade

The Max Capital Per Trade input controls how much money the detail page assumes you'd have committed to each alert. Every number on the page — stats cards, equity curve, P&L percentages — recalculates instantly when you change it. The setting is remembered separately for each strategy, so a $5,000 sizing on one strategy and a $500 sizing on another won't step on each other.

Example

A strategy's historical equity curve looks great at $1,000 per trade. Bump it to $5,000 and you'll see how that same track record would have played out with more capital behind every alert — bigger wins, bigger losses, and a bigger drawdown line.

Min Win % Threshold (entry-only sources)

Some strategies publish entry-only alerts — meaning the alert says "buy this" but never publishes a corresponding exit. For these strategies the detail page can't always tell whether an old alert was a winner or a loser. That's where the Min Win % input comes in: you tell the page the minimum profit a trade had to reach to count as a win. Anything that hit that bar is a WIN; anything that didn't is a LOSS; alerts that haven't fully played out yet are POTENTIAL. See the Signal Sources topic for more on entry-only vs entry+exit.

The MAX badge and POTENTIAL pill

On entry-only strategies you'll see two extra markings:

• A MAX badge on a row's P&L means the number shown is the best the trade ever reached (the session high), not necessarily what you would have walked away with. It's a "best-case" reference point.
• A POTENTIAL outcome pill marks trades that haven't met your Min Win % threshold or your equivalent of a final answer — they're still open-ended.

Futures strategies look different

A strategy tagged with an amber Futures pill trades index futures — NQ, ES, RTY — instead of options. Open one and the detail page changes shape, because almost nothing from the options view applies: a futures contract has no strike, no expiration, no contract type, and most futures strategies signal entries only and never publish an exit price.

So instead of "entry price → exit price," a futures listing reports the two numbers that actually describe how a trade went:

• Max Profit — the best the trade ever got. The furthest price ran in your favor before anything else happened.
• Max Drawdown — the worst it ever got. The furthest price ran against you while the trade was open.

Both are shown in ticks and in dollars, with the time of day each one happened. A tick is the smallest amount a contract can move: on NQ and MNQ a tick is 0.25 points, and four ticks make a point.

Example

A long NQ alert from 11:42 AM shows Max Profit +88t +$44.00 and Max Drawdown −14t −$7.00. In plain English: after that alert, price ran 22 points in your favour — worth $44 on one Micro contract — and at its worst point it was 3.5 points against you, or $7 down.

Choosing your contract and your exits

Above the table, the Futures Simulator replaces the capital-based one. Four settings, and everything on the page recalculates the moment you change any of them:

• Contract — flip between the Micro (MNQ) and the Mini (NQ). A mini is exactly ten times the size of its micro, so this multiplies every dollar figure on the page by ten. Most listings start on Micro, the cheaper of the two.
• Contracts per trade — how many you'd have bought each time.
• Minimum ticks to count a win — your take-profit. How far in your favour a trade had to run for you to have banked it.
• Max ticks drawdown to count a loss — your stop. How far against you a trade had to run before you'd have been knocked out.

Each of those three has ▲ / ▼ buttons next to it, so you can nudge a number up and down and watch the whole page move rather than clicking in and retyping.

Every listing opens on a starting set of these four, chosen to suit the kind of trading it does — a strategy that scalps a few points opens on a tight take-profit and stop, while one that holds for a swing opens on a much wider pair, and on the Mini. Change any of them and the page remembers your choice for that listing next time you visit.

Every alert is then replayed as if you'd taken it with exactly those two exits. A win banks your take-profit; a loss banks your stop. That's what the Win Rate, Total P&L and the equity curve are measuring — not a best case you could never have captured.

The order matters, and the page knows it. A trade that finished up 88 ticks might have first dropped 14 ticks against you. If your stop was 10 ticks, you were never in that trade to enjoy the recovery — and the page counts it as the loss it would have been. This isn't guesswork: the platform recorded the price second by second while the alert was live, and replays it.

Example

Set the take-profit to 40 ticks and the stop to 20, and an alert reads WIN +$20.00. Tighten the stop to 5 ticks and the same alert flips to LOSS −$2.50 — because it dipped 6 ticks before it ever reached your target. Nothing was refetched; the page just re-read the recorded price history.

Letting the page find your settings for you

You don't have to guess at those two numbers. Two buttons — Best win rate and Best total P&L — try every take-profit and stop combination the recorded price history can tell apart, and jump straight to whichever pair scored highest. The result line underneath shows what it found: the win rate, the total, the settings themselves, and the reward:risk of those settings.

That last number is the one to look at hardest. The search maximizes the bottom line, and on a short track record the bottom line can sometimes be maximized by aiming for a tiny profit behind a stop so wide it almost never gets hit. That looks wonderful on paper and hurts badly the first time the stop does get hit — so if the reward:risk comes back well under 1, the page says so plainly.

Warning

These buttons find the settings that would have worked best on trades that have already happened. That is not the same as the settings that will work best on the next one. Use the answer as a starting point, then look at a few rows' profit ladders to check the stop it picked has real breathing room — not that it just happened to squeak past the worst dip in the record.

Example

Click Best total P&L and it lands on 24t / 15t with a reward:risk of 1.60:1 — you're aiming to make more than you're risking, which is a sensible shape. Click Best win rate instead and it might offer 6t / 40t at a 97% win rate: almost every trade "wins," but at 0.15:1 you're risking nearly seven times what you're trying to make, and one loss wipes out many wins.

Reading the profit ladder

Hover over any row's Max Profit and the full ladder pops up — the same card the Discord alert posts, in points, with the mini and micro dollar values side by side. Or click the ▸ arrow at the left of the row to pin it open. Either way you get each profit level the trade reached, and the worst drawdown it had endured by the time it got there:

+40t   +$20.00     worst drawdown    −6t   −$3.00
+88t   +$44.00     worst drawdown   −14t   −$7.00   peak

Read top to bottom, this tells you whether a big winner was a comfortable ride or a white-knuckle one. Two strategies can both show "+88 ticks" and be completely different trades: one that never went more than 3 ticks against you, and one that nearly stopped you out twice on the way. The ladder is where you see which is which — and it's the fastest way to pick a stop that survives this strategy's normal wobble.

Futures result pills

• WIN / LOSS — your take-profit or your stop was reached, in that order.
• TIME — neither one was ever reached. The trade simply ran until the platform stopped tracking it, and the P&L shown is what it was worth at that moment.
• EST — no second-by-second price history was recorded for that alert (usually an older one). Max Profit and Max Drawdown are still accurate; what's estimated is which came first, worked out from the times the high and the low occurred.

Note

There's no Max Capital Per Trade on a futures listing, and no required-capital figure. Futures are sized in contracts, not dollars, and how much cash your broker wants you to hold per contract is set by the broker — not by the strategy. See Futures Strategies (Tradovate) for what each contract is worth and how to actually run one.

Live versus static sources

A strategy that's currently live (still publishing alerts) shows real-time prices on its Open Positions. A strategy that's been retired or paused still shows its historical record, but no live updates.

Tip

The detail page is the right place to kick the tires before you subscribe. Look at the equity curve at your preferred sizing, scroll the historical trade list to spot streaks of losses, and decide whether that pattern is something you could sit through.