Clone, Share, and Import Bots

A bot you like rarely stays a one-off. Clone it for a variation, share it with another trader or your group, or import a whole batch from a text file.

Clone a bot

On the View Bots page, click Clone to New Bot in a bot's Actions column. tradeSteward opens the bot editor with every setting copied so you can rename it, tweak what you want, and save it as a brand new bot. Cloning is the fastest way to build a set of similar bots that differ in one or two settings, like entry time or strike target.

Cloning a Multi-Entry bot duplicates the whole bot, every entry included, as one new bot named COPY: original name. The copy is created with every entry disabled so you can review it before anything trades. Entries can't be cloned individually.

Share a bot with a link

Click Get Share Link in the Actions column and confirm with Share It. tradeSteward generates a share link you can copy and send to anyone. When they open it, they land on a Shared Bot page showing the bot's full settings, read only, with a Copy to my account button that adds a copy to their own account after a confirmation, and a Run Backtick button for testing it first. Trades run on their account and their broker; sharing only copies settings. Copy a bot to your account walks through what the recipient sees. If you open your own share link, the page shows This is your shared bot with a Stop Sharing button instead.

If the shared bot is a Multi-Entry bot, its page adds an info callout counting its entries and explaining that copying it recreates the full Multi-Entry setup, with every entry disabled, in the recipient's account.

List a bot on your shared bots page

The same Bot Sharing dialog has a Shared bots page section. Turning on List on my shared bots page puts the bot on your shared bots page at /shared/YourName, under a public title and description you choose. Listing and creating a share link are two separate choices: you can do either one, both, or neither, and turning one on or off never changes the other.

• A listed bot is open to whoever can see your page. That is the public when your page is set to Public, or the members of your group when it is set to My Group. Your page is private until you turn Public or My Group on in Account Settings.
• A share link is public for anyone who has it. It keeps working whether or not the bot is listed, until you stop sharing that bot.
• Stopping sharing removes the link but not the listing. To take a bot off your page, turn off List on my shared bots page and save. Archiving or deleting a bot removes both.

People who open a listed bot see the same read-only settings and can use Copy to my account or run a Backtick on it; see Visiting a Shared Bots Page. Your Shared Bots Page covers claiming a page name, listing limits, and who can see the page.

Share with your trading group

If you belong to a trading group, each bot's Actions column also carries Share Bot with Group (the same control appears as Group Share on the bot edit page, and in the bulk bar for sharing several bots at once). It opens the Share Bot with Group window, where you give the bot a display name for the group, an optional description, and group tags, and can turn on Prohibit Share Links to stop members who copy it from creating share links of their own outside the group. Group shared bots appear for every member on the Group Shared Bots page under the Bots menu, where members can browse the shared settings and take any bot into their own account with Add to Account. That opens a dialog on the same page, where you choose the trading account and strategy for the new bots. Naming, sizing, tags, and portfolio options sit behind Advanced options, and a preview shows exactly what will be created before anything is. You can also run a Backtick on a shared bot without taking it at all: the action runs that bot's shared settings straight from the group page, and nothing is added to your account. Select Multiple turns on bulk actions: every member can add several shared bots to their account in one pass, or use Run Backtick to run the whole selection together as a single portfolio. You can also stop sharing, tag, and rename the shares you created, several at a time. Group administrators can bulk manage every share in the group, and in a sub-manager group they can also set tier-based access on shared bots; see Run a Trading Group. A group-shared Multi-Entry bot works with both actions: Add to Account recreates the complete bot in your account, while Backtick recreates the Multi-Entry bot in the run with every enabled entry included.

Import bots from a file

To create many bots in one pass, open the Bots menu and choose Import Bots. The import works from two ingredients:

• A base settings bot. Pick any existing bot under Select Base Settings Bot (the list groups your Enabled and Disabled bots). Its configuration fills in every setting your file does not mention, and Edit Bot and Create New Bot shortcuts sit right there if the template needs adjusting first.
• A configuration file. A plain text file where each bot you want to create overrides just the settings that differ, like symbol, entry time, or quantity.

This combination means your file stays short: define a solid template bot once, then import twenty variations in a few lines each. The full file format, with examples, is documented in the Bot Import Format Reference.

For a spread or iron condor with a wing sized from the underlying price, set spread_type=underlying_percent_width and spread_target=0.01 for a 1% Vertical Width-Underlying %. The format reference lists the other spread targeting choices.

Set the import options

The Template Upload card is where you attach your file and shape the results:

• Bot Settings Import File: click Browse and pick your text file.
• Bot Name Prepend: an optional prefix (the placeholder suggests Import-) added to every created bot's name so a batch is easy to spot and filter later.
• Strategy Assignment: choose the strategy the imported bots report under. If your file assigns strategies per bot, View Strategy IDs for Import File Reference lists the IDs to use.
• Disable Existing Bots: decide what happens to bots already in the account, so an import can cleanly replace an old batch instead of stacking on top of it.
• Portfolio Assignment: leave the imports loose, append them to an existing portfolio, or create a new portfolio from the batch in the same step.

Click Import Bots to run it.

Review the results

Anything the importer could not process is listed under Import Errors with the reason. The Imported Bots Updated/Created table lists every bot the import touched, and its bulk controls finish the job: Select All, change strategy for the selection, Toggle Selected Bots to enable them, add the selection to a portfolio, or Delete All Imported Bots if the batch came out wrong.

Which one should you use?