Now I'm still trying to use some sort of automation to pick options, however I am narrowing my approach to specific strategies. I made a macro that calculates the breakeven/max profit/max loss for each butterfly in a given range, including skip strikes and very odd combinations such as 297 or 154. After that I can simply filter the list according to the criteria I want, such as minimum loss, capital requirements etc. No way to use the solver here, there are too many parameters that a human can consider very quickly but that would require months of programming (at my current skill level). Overall this seems the way to go, at least from a single retail point of view.
