If you would like to set aside a certain percentage of your portfolio into a low risk ETF like a bond ETF, read along to see how Whispertrades can manage this for you.

Options traders often sit on large, unused cash balances in their brokerage accounts. To put this cash to use without introducing significant risk, some options traders will purchase low risk and/or low correlation ETFs such as bond ETFs and collect dividends with their unused cash balance. This is what we're referencing when we discuss "collateral". It is your available cash balance placed in an ETF while you use margin to trade options.

If you're interested in holding collateral in the form of ETFs, Whispertrades can manage this for you, buying and selling periodically in order to maintain your target portfolio allocation.

Collateral management comes at no extra charge and is available for free to all active bot users. You are subject to any trading commissions or fees that your broker charges for trade execution, but there is no Whispertrades cost for collateral management.

Collateral will only be rebalanced for active broker connections and when a bot for that broker connection was active over the last 24 hours when the collateral rebalance takes place. As long as your bots are active, Whispertrades will continue to manage your collateral at no charge. If you stop using your bots, Whispertrades will no longer automatically rebalance your collateral.

First, head over to your broker connections and then click on the broker connection that you would like to configure.

On the right side of the page, click "Edit Collateral Settings" to open a window for you to configure your collateral position.

After clicking the button for collateral settings, you will see the following fields:

This is a dropdown list of liquid and low risk equity and bond ETFs that are commonly used for collateral. Select the symbol that you'd like Whispertrades to establish a position in.

For collateral allocation, you can either target a certain percentage of your portfolio (NLV) or you can target a specific dollar amount.

Min / Target / Max Portfolio %: Here you can enter the percentage values at which Whispertrades will buy or sell collateral and how much of the portfolio to target with each transaction. Minimum is the level at which Whispertrades will purchase more shares. Target is the level that Whispertrades will target when buying or selling collateral. Maximum is the level at which Whispertrades will sell collateral shares to reach your target. These percentages are based on the Net Liquidation Value of your portfolio. If you would like to place about half of your portfolio in this collateral, buying more when it gets to 47% and selling when it gets to 53%, your configuration would look like this:

Min / Target / Max Dollar Amount: Enter the desired dollar value at which Whispertrades will buy or sell collateral and how much in total to target when rebalancing. Minimum is the level at which Whispertrades will purchase more shares. Target is the level that Whispertrades will target when buying or selling collateral. Maximum is the level at which Whispertrades will sell collateral shares to reach your target.

At the bottom of collateral settings, you'll see a few fields under the heading "Schedule". These fields will control when Whispertrades will rebalance your collateral for you. You can do this Quarterly*, Monthly*, Weekly*, or Daily. On your schedule, Whispertrades will check the current collateral holding in your brokerage account and ensure that it is within Min and Max portfolio % targets. If it is, nothing will happen. If the collateral is outside of your Min or Max targets, then Whispertrades will buy or sell shares to reach your target portfolio %.

*Quarterly, Monthly, and Weekly schedules will rebalance on the last trading day of each period (last day of the quarter/month/week).

You can, at any point, view your broker connection at Whispertrades to see the amount of collateral currently held in your portfolio. Below that box, you'll also see a list of prior transactions that were sent from Whispertrades:

Collateral postions/performance do not show up in your Whispertrades performance, statistics, or bot reports.

If you would like to receive notifications for when collateral is bought or sold, you can set those up using Notifications