Intraday options backtesting
Backtest your favorite options strategy using 10-second intervals for extreme accuracy. When the results hold up, hand the same strategy to an options trading bot to trade it live.
Pay only for what you use, from $0.50 per backtest, with no monthly fees.
The basics
What is options backtesting?
Options backtesting means running a strategy's exact rules against historical market data to see how it would have performed: every entry, every fill, every exit, and every drawdown, computed from real quotes instead of guesswork. A good options backtesting tool answers the only question that matters before you risk capital: has this strategy actually worked, and what did it cost to find out?
Resolution is what separates useful answers from misleading ones. Options are path-dependent: premiums decay by the hour, gamma moves strikes in and out of danger intraday, and stops trigger at specific moments. A backtester built on daily bars cannot see the stop that hit at 10:14 in the morning or the profit target that filled and reversed before lunch. Whispertrades evaluates every trade at 10-second intervals so the backtest walks the same path your live trade would have walked.
Trillions of data points at 10-second intervals
Options backtests that track live results
Most backtests rely on minute or day data. If you're trading short duration strategies, this isn't good enough. Use our 10-second backtests to see results that match live trades.
Our benchmark strategy, run live and in the backtester. Blue is the backtest; green is real trades executed by our bots; white is the difference between them.
- Powerful inputs
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Test the most popular options positions, with custom inputs for entry and exit timing, strike selection, and scheduled or observed events like FOMC days, gap downs, and technical indicators.
- Portfolio performance
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Combine multiple strategies into a single backtest to see how your entire portfolio performs with a unified report.
- Quick results
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Don't spend months testing your strategies with live trades. Backtest years of data and view the results in seconds.
The data
Options backtesting software built on real intraday data
Concrete numbers, because superlatives are cheap. Every backtest runs on institutional-grade historical options quotes, evaluated the way your live trades would be.
- 10-second
- Evaluation intervals
- 2016 to now
- History depth
- SPX · SPY · QQQ · IWM · VIX
- Backtest symbols
- Trillions
- Of data points
A single tick can lie: quotes flicker, spreads gap, and one bad print can fill a backtest at a price no live order would ever get. So instead of trusting one tick, Whispertrades samples multiple data points inside every 10-second interval and smooths them into a fair-value quote. Liquidity filters then exclude extreme deltas and wide bid/ask spreads, so your results never depend on fills that would not exist in the real market.
Read exactly how the data works in our data methodology docs.
Backtest options strategies the way you'd actually trade them
A backtest is only as honest as the rules it can express. Whispertrades gives your backtests the same decision vocabulary as your live trading.
- 16 position types, 75 per test
- Long and short calls, puts, spreads, straddles, strangles, iron condors, and iron butterflies, combined into portfolio-level tests.
- Strike selection with intent
- Target strikes by delta, % OTM, or premium, and on SPX even pin them to GEX levels like the put wall, call wall, or flip level.
- Entry filters that mean something
- Gate entries on VIX, IV and IV Rank, moving averages, % moves from the open or prior close, and moves from intraday highs and lows within configurable time windows.
- Economic-event awareness
- Avoid or deliberately trade around 12 scheduled market events, from FOMC and CPI to the jobs reports, ISM surveys and option expirations, with a window you set for each.
- The full exit engine
- Profit targets by percent, delta, or premium; stop losses including delta and % ITM stops; trailing stops; moving-average exits; GEX-level exits on SPX; and timed exits.
- Sizing and pacing control
- Allocate by fixed quantity, leverage, or percent of portfolio by max risk, then pace entries with re-entry rules, max entries per day, and minutes between trades.
- Position triggers
- Chain positions together: enter one while another is open, or after another closes at a profit or a loss.
- Fills and fees, modeled
- Fills price at what real orders of the same kind filled at on Whispertrades, with your broker's per-contract and assignment fees on top and stop sensitivity from Super Patient to Super Aggressive.
Six steps, no code
How to backtest an options strategy
Pick the trade, set the rules, and run it against 10-second option prices back to 2016. In Whispertrades that is six fields and a few minutes, with no code to write. When the result holds up, the same fields become the options trading bot that trades it live.
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Pick the underlying and the position type
SPX, SPY, QQQ, IWM, or VIX, and any of 16 position types: calls and puts, credit and debit spreads, straddles, strangles, iron condors, and iron butterflies, long or short. Stack up to 75 positions in one backtest to test a whole portfolio at once.
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Set the expiration and the strikes
Target days to expiration, with a minimum and maximum if you want them, then pick each strike by delta, percent out of the money, premium, or premium as a percent of the underlying. On SPX a strike can also sit at the day's GEX call wall, put wall, or flip level. See the strike selection docs.
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Set the entry rules
Choose the entry time and how often it may trade, then add the filters that keep it out of the wrong days: VIX, IV and IV Rank, moving averages, the move from the open or the prior close, and event days such as FOMC and CPI.
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Set the exits
Profit targets, stop losses, trailing stops, delta and in-the-money stops, moving-average and GEX exits on SPX, and timed exits. Use any mix; the first one hit closes the trade.
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Add your broker's fees
Enter your per-contract fee and, if a position can be held through expiration, an assignment fee. Fills need no setup: the Dynamic fill model prices them at what real orders of that kind filled at on Whispertrades, matched by symbol, position type, order type, days to expiration, time of day, and spread width. There is no slippage number to guess at. See the fill settings docs.
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Run it and read the results
The exact price shows before you run: $0.50 per position for the full history, a fraction of that for a shorter range. Results come back next to buy-and-hold on total return, CAGR, max drawdown, MAR, Sharpe, Sortino, and profit factor, and every trade carries its own minute-by-minute timeline.
From $0.50 per backtest. No subscription, no code.
What to check in the results
- Drawdown before return. A 40% return through a 35% drawdown is a strategy most traders abandon at the bottom. MAR, return divided by max drawdown, puts both in one number.
- The worst stretch, not the average. Read the longest losing streak and the largest loss, then look at 2018, 2020, and 2022, which are all inside the data.
- Enough trades. A few dozen prove nothing; a few hundred start to.
- Against buy-and-hold. Every result sits beside the index for the same dates, drawdown included. More return per unit of drawdown is the bar, not just more return.
Avoid curve-fitting
- Sweep, don't tune. A sweep runs one position across a whole range of a setting in one go, every stop from 100% to 300% in 25% steps, say. A good setting sits in a neighborhood of good settings; a lone peak is noise.
- Hold time out. Build on one date range and confirm on another you have not looked at. A short confirmation run costs a fraction of a cent.
- Compare, then simplify. Put up to 50 backtests side by side with a correlation matrix, see which rules carry the result, and drop the rest.
A worked example
Two short SPX positions, September 2016 to April 2026
A public backtest, "WO Classic with 2 Positions", sells an SPX put at a 0.065 delta and an SPX call at a 0.025 delta the day before expiration, closes each at a profit target, and models $1 per-contract fees and slippage on every fill. The headline numbers:
- 667.1%
- Total return
- 23.6%
- CAGR
- 20.9%
- Max drawdown
- 1.13
- MAR
- 5,008
- Trades
- 97.7%
- Win rate
The win rate is the number that sells a strategy like this, and the one to read last. The 4,894 winners averaged $3,536 and the 114 losers averaged $93,278, so one bad stretch gives back months of gains, and the deepest drawdown ran 436 days. A MAR of 1.13 says the return earned its drawdown. Whether you could sit through that drawdown is the question a backtest cannot answer for you.
Accuracy, measured
Validated against live trades
A backtester should have to prove itself. Whispertrades runs the same mechanical strategies live through its automated options trading bots and compares the backtest's answers with real fills, using fast-moving same-day SPX strategies as the hardest test case. Across thousands of live trades, we've measured less than a 3% margin of error.
That works because backtests and bots share the same machinery: the same 10-second evaluation cadence and the same stop-sensitivity settings. A strategy that survives your backtest converts to a live bot without changing how it is evaluated.
Market intelligence
Dealer gamma exposure (GEX)
Visualize dealer gamma positioning to identify key support and resistance levels driven by options market makers. See put walls, call walls, and the flip level that define where dealer hedging amplifies or dampens market moves.
- GEX by strike and DTE.
- Break down gamma exposure by individual strike prices and days to expiration to pinpoint where dealer positioning is concentrated.
- Strike selection at key levels.
- Backtest SPX strategies with strikes pinned to GEX levels like the put wall, call wall, or flip level to see how dealer positioning affects your fills and outcomes.
- Use as entry and exit conditions.
- Filter SPX backtests by GEX regime, total GEX levels, or proximity to key levels, and even exit when the underlying crosses a GEX wall.
Results you can dissect, share, and re-run
Every backtest produces a benchmark comparison against buy-and-hold of the underlying: total return, CAGR, drawdown, MAR, Sharpe, Sortino, profit factor, volatility, correlation, and beta. Drill into any trade's minute-by-minute timeline, replay the intraday balance curve, and export everything to CSV.
Then iterate: compare up to 50 backtests side by side with a correlation matrix, clone a test to tweak one variable, or sweep a whole parameter range in one pass. When a result is worth showing off, share any completed backtest with a public link that anyone can view, no Whispertrades account required.
Pay per backtest, not per month
Each position in a backtest costs $0.50 for the full 2016-to-present history, prorated down for shorter date ranges: a one-month test runs for under a penny. A single backtest holds up to 75 positions, you see the exact charge before you run, and it comes out of your prepaid balance when you start the run, returned in full if you stop it or it fails. There is no monthly subscription to keep paying between tests.
- $0.50
- 1 strangle, 10+ years
- ~$0.004
- 1 iron condor, one month
- $0.195
- 1 strangle since 2022
See the full breakdown on our pricing page, or the backtest pricing details in the docs.
How Whispertrades compares to other options backtesters
Every backtester makes trade-offs. Here is where ours sit, beside each vendor's own published figures. Deeper history and single stocks are reasons to pick another tool; finer data, no DTE cap, and paying per test are the reasons to pick this one.
| Whispertrades | Option Alpha | Option Omega | ORATS Intraday | tastytrade | tradeSteward Backtick | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data resolution | 10-second evaluation, multiple samples smoothed per interval | 1-minute | 1-minute; SPX and SPY 0DTE stops checked every second | 1-minute | Not published | 1-second |
| History | January 2016 | January 2013 (XSP 2015) | January 2013 | 2020 | 10+ years | Not published |
| Symbols | SPX, SPY, QQQ, IWM, VIX | SPX, SPY, QQQ, IWM, XSP | 12, including single stocks | About 140 | "Many popular symbols" | Not published |
| Expirations | No cap; quotes from about 130 DTE | Up to 45 DTE | Not published | 1 to 30 DTE | Not published | Not published |
| Price | $0.50 per position for the full history, prorated; no subscription | $99/mo billed annually or $149 monthly; $0 with a qualifying broker account | From $49.99/mo billed annually | $99/mo | Free with a tastytrade account | Separate subscription, price not published |
| Runs as a live bot | Yes, one click; the bot starts disabled for review | Yes | Yes, on Premium | Not published | No built-in bot | Yes |
Competitor figures are from each vendor's own public pages as of October 2026, and they change often; verify current details with each provider. Whispertrades figures are from our data documentation.
Empowering retail traders with institutional-grade software
Many retail traders find themselves stumbling in the dark, following so-called "pro" traders, only realizing their strategy doesn't work after they lose money trying. Then comes DIY solutions that often fail as well. You don't need to do this. Backtest your strategy before you invest your money into it.
We've partnered with the best data providers in the industry to bring to you an intraday options backtesting engine that you can rely on.
Don't waste your time and money trying trading strategies that do not work. Run them through the Whispertrades backtester to immediately see detailed results and then modify the parameters until you find a combination that works for you and your goals.
- Launch date
- September 2022
- Backtest trades
- 775M+
Backtesting questions, answered
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$0.50 per position for the full 2016-to-present history, prorated down for shorter date ranges. A one-month test costs under a penny, and you see the exact charge before you run. There is no subscription; the charge comes from a prepaid balance when you start the run, and goes back if you stop it or it fails.
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Whispertrades has no free tier. What we offer instead is pricing that scales to zero commitment: short backtests cost fractions of a cent, so proving out an idea usually costs less than a coffee. Tools that advertise free backtesting typically gate it behind a funded brokerage account or a subscription.
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SPX, SPY, QQQ, IWM, and VIX. SPX coverage is the PM-settled weekly (SPXW) chain. Full details are in the data documentation.
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January 2016 to present, evaluated at 10-second intervals. There is no artificial DTE cap on strategies; option quotes begin roughly 130 days before each expiration.
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Multiple data points are sampled within every 10-second interval and smoothed into a fair-value quote, and liquidity filters exclude extreme deltas and wide bid/ask spreads so results never rely on fills the real market would not give you. Fills then price at what real orders of the same kind filled at on Whispertrades, with your broker fees on top, and our live-trade comparisons have measured less than a 3% margin of error.
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Yes. Any completed backtest can be shared with a public link, and viewers don't need a Whispertrades account to see the full results and benchmark comparison.
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Yes. Click "Create Bot from this Backtest" and the bot is built from the backtest's configuration; it starts disabled so you can review every setting before enabling it. Backtests and bots share the 10-second evaluation cadence and stop-sensitivity settings, so the strategy behaves the way the backtest measured it.
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No. Every rule, from strike selection to stops to fill assumptions, is a field in the web builder, and the bot that trades a finished strategy is built from the same fields.
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Anything outside the five underlyings, so no single stocks. There are no stock legs, which rules out covered calls and the share-holding half of the wheel. The 16 position types do not include calendars, diagonals, or ratio spreads. A leg held in the money to expiration is closed and charged the assignment fee you set; it never becomes a stock position.
Put your strategy to the test
A full-history backtest starts at $0.50, and a short one costs less than a penny. Know your edge before you risk a dollar.