Relay is RelayDesk's integrated AI trading assistant. Unlike a generic chatbot, Relay has direct access to your account, your bots, your trade history, your configurations, and your performance data. That means when you ask it a question, the answer is about your account, not a hypothetical.

This guide walks you through opening Relay, understanding the interface, and getting real value out of your first session.

Two ways to open Relay

Ask Relay widget

The Ask Relay button sits in the bottom-right corner of every page in the platform. Click it to open a compact chat window without leaving what you're looking at. It's designed for quick questions like "how did my bots do today?", "what's my SPY win rate?", "pause my QQQ bot." The widget is available to all authenticated users on every page.

Full assistant page

The Assistant page in the main navigation gives you a complete conversational workspace: a full conversation sidebar on the left, quick-start templates for common workflows, and a larger response area for detailed analysis, comparison cards, and trade replay visualizations.

Both entry points connect to the same Relay. The difference is surface area. Use the widget for quick lookups and the Assistant page for anything that needs more room.

The subtitle on the Assistant welcome screen tells you exactly what Relay can do: "Ask about trades, optimize bots, replay executions, or get performance insights."

Understanding the interface

Capability chips

The first thing you'll notice is a row of eight quick-access chips:

Search trades — Find trades by symbol, date, outcome, or any other criteria
Performance reports — Pull structured performance data across any time range
Bot management — Query and manage your active bots through conversation
Trade replay — Step through a closed trade's execution lifecycle
Execution speed — Analyze entry and exit timing across your bots
Streak analysis — Examine winning and losing streaks in context
Compare bots — Side-by-side comparison across all your bots
VIX correlation — See how your bot performance maps to volatility levels

Each chip is a one-click starting point. Clicking one sends a pre-formed query to Relay and starts a conversation around that topic. You can follow up with additional questions from there.

The full capability grid

Behind the welcome screen, Relay also exposes a full grid of twelve purpose-built analytical modes — everything from Weekly Review and Bot Health Check to Equity Curve and What-If Simulation. You can access these by clicking "View all capabilities" or by simply typing what you want. Relay will route your request to the right analysis automatically.

The conversation thread

Every interaction with Relay works as a conversation. Relay holds context across your messages in a session, so you can ask a follow-up question without re-stating everything. For example:

"How did my bots do this week?" (Relay responds with a weekly summary) "Which one had the highest win rate?" (Relay pulls the specific answer from the same data set)

You don't need to start a new query for every question.

Writing good queries

Relay understands plain language, so you don't need to use special syntax. That said, being specific gets you better results.

Less useful:

"How are my bots doing?"

More useful:

"How did my SPY bots perform over the last 30 days?"

Even more useful:

"Compare my SPY BEAR ODTE and QQQ UT bots for the last 30 days — show me win rate, P&L, and average hold time."

A few tips:

Name specific bots when you want bot-specific data rather than account-wide summaries
Specify a time range — last 7 days, this month, last 90 days — to get focused results
Ask for what you actually want — if you want a comparison, say "compare." If you want a recommendation, ask for one. Relay responds to the framing of your question.
Follow up freely — if the response isn't quite what you needed, ask a clarifying follow-up. You don't have to start over.

Your first three queries

If you're opening Relay for the first time, here's a practical starting sequence:

1. Get your bearings

"Give me a summary of my bots and how they've been performing this month."

This surfaces a high-level view of your current bot portfolio: what's active, what the P&L looks like, and any patterns worth noting.

2. Dig into your best performer

"Tell me more about [bot name] — what's driving its win rate?"

Relay will break down the trade history, identify patterns in when it wins and loses, and surface the config settings that appear most relevant.

3. Check for anything unusual

"Are there any anomalies or unusual patterns in my recent trades?"

This kicks off Relay's anomaly detection, useful for spotting trades that behaved unexpectedly or time periods where performance diverged from the norm.

What Relay can and can't do

Relay analyzes your account data, surfaces patterns and comparisons, and can also propose and apply changes to your bot configurations. It won't do anything silently though. Every proposed change goes through a confirmation step where you review exactly what will change before anything is written.

What Relay will do:

Retrieve and display your trade history, performance stats, and bot data
Run analysis like trade scoring, bot comparison, VIX correlation, and what-if simulations
Propose bot configuration changes (stop loss, take profit, cooldown, sizing, entry window, status) that you confirm before they're applied
Create new bots as drafts through a guided conversational flow
Explain how any platform feature works

What Relay won't do:

Place, modify, or cancel broker orders. Relay has no access to order execution.
Predict future market movements or price direction
Recommend specific securities, strikes, or expiries
Make any configuration change without your explicit confirmation in the chat UI

All time references in Relay use Eastern Time (ET) trading day boundaries. "Today" means the current trading session (9:30 AM–4:00 PM ET), not midnight UTC.

Cross-conversation memory

Relay remembers context across conversations. When you mention a preference — your preferred symbols, a nickname for a bot, your trading style, your timezone — it saves that context quietly (no popup, no confirmation) and carries it into future sessions.

This means you don't have to re-introduce yourself every time. If you tell Relay "I mostly trade 0DTE SPY" in one conversation, it factors that in when you ask about strategy recommendations in the next one. The memory builds up over time, making Relay progressively more useful the more you use it.

Next steps

Once you're comfortable with the basics, the rest of the Relay How-To series goes deep on each capability:

Weekly Review — how to use it as a regular strategy check-in
Compare Bots — reading the side-by-side output and knowing what to act on
What-If Simulation — testing parameter changes before you make them live
Trade Replay — learning from individual trades bar by bar
VIX Correlation — understanding how volatility affects your specific bots

Start simple, ask real questions, and let the data guide you.

Getting Started with Relay: Your First Conversation