How you can use $2,000/month data to build an options trading bot for free

How to deploy a trading strategy with AI. No code required.

5 min readMar 30, 2026

I’m unfortunately at the stage of my business where I can’t cosplay as a small indie hacker trying to build a little app. I’m officially a “real” business.

It sucks.

When doing simple things that used to be cheap (such as buying data), I have to be the “business plan”. While I can hack together cheap, unreliable, probably illegally distributed data, a trading strategy is only as good as the data it uses.

So I bit the bullet and decided to pay over $2,000/month for high quality, minute-by-minute currency, equity, and option trading data.

Here’s how you can use it to build an option trading bot for free.

Are you really spending a rent payment on data?

I first want to address the elephant in the room… Why am I spending the equivalent of a brand new Corvette car payment just to get access to “better quality” data?

The answer is simple: garbage in, garbage out.

When you create a trading strategy, the performance you get depends solely on the input data into the platform. Cheaper quality data is much more likely to have data defects, be updated less quickly, and likely to present misleading results to the user.

For example, when I was just starting out building NexusTrade and used less-than-stellar data, I frequently saw instances of stocks having a market cap of over $50 trillion while making less than $100,000 in revenue.

It happened more often than you’d imagine.

And to tell you the truth, I was sick of it. I was sick of spending hours manually updating the database because 15% of the stocks listed had data quality issues that were egregious. If I’m building something as powerful as minute-by-minute option trading strategies that cover 5,000 stocks simultaneously, I want it to be reliable from day 1… not after I lost the community’s trust.

Here’s how you can utilize this data to build your own options trading bot.

Creating an options trading bot using an AI Assistant

To create an options trading bot, do the following steps.

Go to nexustrade.io and create a free account
Go to nexustrade.io/public and connect your Public brokerage account. You can be a new or existing Public user. This step allows you to create your bots for absolutely free
Go to nexustrade.io/chat and type in the following prompt

Create a strategy that buys 6 to 12 month expiry deep ITM calls when SPY has a drawdown above 15% and we have no SPY positions. Later is better. Double down on sooner calls when the positions are down 20%

In less than 30 seconds, the AI will generate a trading strategy configuration that’s ready to test.

Using Aurora to create an option trading strategy.

This is the simple chat flow — think ChatGPT for algorithmic trading. You send a description of your strategy and the AI creates it. You ask the AI to test its performance, and the AI will respond in less than 30 seconds.

It’s simple.

The backtest performance of our trading strategy. This specific strategy gained 100% in the past two years, significantly outperforming the broader market

Once we’re confident, we can click “Quick Deploy” and instantly attach our strategy to our Public brokerage (for semi-automated trading) or continue to test its performance with simulated “paper-trading”.

With Aurora, we can go from idea to strategy in less than 2 minutes. But that’s the version of Aurora on training wheels.

What if I told you that you could use Aurora to:

Automatically try out dozens of ideas
Optimize promising trading strategies
Schedule future runs to analyze the broader market and alter trading rules
And create trading strategies end-to-end autonomously

Well… you can. Instead of an AI like ChatGPT, imagine an AI like OpenClaw capable of keeping an eye on your portfolio. That’s the true power of Aurora. Let me show you how it works.

Deploy an end-to-end trading bot with one prompt

To use Aurora’s agentic capabilities, navigate to nexustrade.io/agent. From here, we can type in the following:

Create the perfect strategy that buys long SPY calls and sells them when it’s right. Test a variety of different ideas

From here, the AI can think about a long-term plan, autonomously create dozens of trading strategies, test them simultaneously, and narrow down potential long-term winners.

Using Aurora’s agent capabilities to create a full trading plan

Imagine telling the AI to look at your watchlist and to find interesting trends. Then imagine automatically transforming those trends into trading strategies that are robust across the past five years. You can transform an idea into a list of trading strategies all from a single prompt!

You now have the same tools as a quant fund

Two years ago, if you wanted to test a strategy on minute-level options data across thousands of stocks, you’d need to spend 5-figures on data, 6-figures on engineers, and have an on-call staff just to test your simple daytrading strategy.

Now you can do it with a sentence.

This isn’t software that you can blindly deposit money into with the expectation of guaranteed returns. It’s institutional-grade infrastructure for serious, data-driven investors. You can test your strategy on a simulated account, run thousands of backtests, and get insights into your performance without risking a single dollar.

Imagine trading 0DTE Tesla options because you researched the past 12 earnings sessions and saw that call options are almost always over-priced 1 week into earnings.

Imagine creating the optimal hedging strategy to protect your retirement and life savings.

You can login, talk to an AI, and create a tailored algorithmic trading strategy without writing a single line of code. Something like this was unheard of even 2 years ago.

What will you do about it?