Video Transcript: The Advanced Point-&-Click Strategies for TradeStation® Built into Quagensia T Edition

Hi, I’m Brook from Quagensia,

And in this video, I will give you a quick introduction to each of the built-in no-code strategies in Quagensia T Edition so that you can use them as-is and customize them without code.

You will learn the basics of what each strategy does, how to get detailed information on using the strategies, how to use them as-is in TradeStation® 10, and the general process that you can use to customize them without code.

For a much more detailed tutorial that will teach you how to customize the built-in strategies without code, please watch the video titled “Introduction to Quagensia T Edition”, which is on our home page at quagensia.com and is linked to here. It will guide you through making a Quagensia T Edition Strategy from scratch and show you the power of Quagensia T Edition and what you can do with it without code. You can then come back and watch this video and customize each of the built-in strategies without code.

All the built-in no-code strategies you see here are free for all users of Quagensia T Edition, and you can even customize them for free during the free trial period without any programming knowledge by simply clicking choices on the screen.

If you’ve already watched the video titled “Introduction to Quagensia T Edition”, you know that Quagensia T Edition makes it easy to create simple yet useful algorithmic trading strategies for TradeStation® 9.5 and TradeStation® 10 without code. Most of the strategies that most new users of Quagensia T Edition will want to create on a day-to-day basis will be like the simple one we built from scratch in that video, with some basic entry and exit rules that when true cause the strategy to submit orders to the backtest engine or to a live market, draw on the chart, and write messages to the EasyLanguage® Print Log.

Most of the strategies you will learn about in this video are significantly more complex than the one you learned how to make from scratch in that video.

In this video you will see how Quagensia T Edition really shines when it comes to enabling you to create advanced, complex trading strategies that are better able to model your most complex trading ideas by using features like loops, lists, single-dimensional arrays, multi-dimensional arrays, and editable time series.

Before we begin, it should be noted that Quagensia T Edition is a product of Quagensia, Inc., a company which has no affiliation with TradeStation Technologies, Inc.

Also, TradeStation® and EasyLanguage® are registered trademarks of TradeStation Technologies, Inc.

Right before making this video, I followed the steps in the video titled “Introduction to Quagensia T Edition” to open up TradeStation® 10, log in with the “Simulated Trading” button, and verify that I was using a simulated trading account, not a live account, by making sure that the account name displayed at the bottom of the window starts with “SIM”.

Then I opened the EasyLanguage® Print Log by clicking here, and opened the TradeStation® Development Environment by clicking here and then here.

Then I opened each of the built-in strategies in their own tabs in Quagensia T Edition as I am demonstrating here and clicked this button, titled “Generate Code and Copy to Clipboard” to generate each built-in strategy’s code and copy it to the clipboard.

Once the code was on the clipboard, I created a new empty strategy in its own tab in the TradeStation® Development Environment as I am demonstrating here, pasted the strategy’s code from the clipboard into the new strategy as I am demonstrating here, and clicked this button in order to check for syntax errors and compile the strategy from plain text into a form that TradeStation® understands so that it can be backtested and optimized from within TradeStation®.

Then, I opened a new Chart Analysis window by clicking “Apps” and then “Chart Analysis” as I am demonstrating, and loaded a chart of many years of historical market data for the symbol SPY as I am now demonstrating. SPY is the symbol for the SPDR S&P 500® ETF, which is designed to track the S&P 500®.

Then I added the strategy to the chart as I am now demonstrating to run a quick backtest of the strategy.

Note that although we will be using TradeStation® 10 in this tutorial, you could follow a similar procedure in TradeStation® 9.5 to do everything that I will show you in this tutorial.

To learn more about a built-in strategy that appears in this video, first open the strategy in its own tab in Quagensia T Edition by clicking on it and selecting “View Strategy” like this.

You can get a good overview of a built-in strategy and specific instructions on its proper use in TradeStation® by reading its “Description and Notes” field.

If you want to learn more, you can scroll down and read through the visible logic and yellow “Comments” such as this one. Some of the built-in strategies also have one or more yellow “Comments” such as this one that starts with “Attention paid users and users whose free trials have not expired” that explain a simple customization that can be made to the strategy without code, and without needing to understand the other more advanced aspects of the strategy.

To learn even more, you can expand all the contracted sections and hidden logic. When you do this the first time in a built-in strategy, it will warn you that your changes to the strategy will be ignored because the strategy file is a read-only file template. You can safely ignore this message and click “OK”. If you make an editable copy of a built-in strategy, you can customize it and expand the contracted sections and hidden logic without seeing this warning.

You can expand the “Input Parameters” section by clicking on its header like this if it is not already expanded and read the descriptions of a strategy’s input parameters.

You can expand the “Internal Variables” section by clicking on its header like this if it is not already expanded and read the descriptions of a strategy’s internal variables.

Most of the built-in strategies also have blue rectangles like this one that contain more advanced logic that was required to build the strategy. To view the logic hidden in these blue rectangles, click on one of them then select “Show This Item’s Details” from the context menu that appears. You can hide the logic again by clicking the gear icon in the upper right of the expanded logic and selecting “Hide This Item’s Details”.

Now that you have the skills you need to get the most out of this video, I will give you a quick introduction to each of the built-in strategies in Quagensia T Edition.

This strategy, titled “Quick Start: Create Your First Strategy”, is a very simple trading strategy that is created from scratch in the “Introduction to Quagensia T Edition” video, which is linked to here. This is the video you should watch before our other instructional videos, including this one. Once you’ve watched it you will be able to quickly and easily create and test your own trading strategies, and you will have gained the skills needed to customize the built-in strategies without code in Quagensia T Edition and backtest them in TradeStation®. When you add this strategy to a chart in a “Chart Analysis” window in TradeStation®, TradeStation® will backtest the strategy, and the chart should display a slow and fast moving average, little diamonds that indicate entry and exit signal bars, and long entries and exits on some of the moving average crossovers, as determined by the logic in this Quagensia Strategy’s “When Bar Updates” section.

This strategy, titled “Conditional Position Sizing (Uses Else If, Else, and Nested If Blocks)”, is a basic moving average crossover strategy that demonstrates using conditional logic to determine the position size of a trade. This strategy is a simple example of the proper use of multiple “Else If” blocks, “Else” blocks, and “nesting” of conditional trading logic blocks inside of other conditional trading logic blocks. When you add this strategy to a chart in a “Chart Analysis” window in TradeStation®, TradeStation® will backtest the strategy, and the chart should display a slow and fast moving average, green and red thick vertical lines that indicate entry and exit signal bars, and long entries and exits on some of the moving average crossovers. Notice how the conditional position sizing logic produced different entry order quantities for bars that met different criteria.

This strategy, titled “Noise-Tolerant Trend Determination (Uses Loop)”, is a noise-tolerant trend following system that demonstrates using a loop to determine if something is true for each of the last X bars, where X is a positive number that can be set here. Specifically, this strategy enters a long position if the close prices of each of the last X bars are higher than the close prices of the bars Y bars before them, where Y is a positive number that can be set here. Each of the last X bars is compared to the bar Y bars before it. This method of trend determination is noise-tolerant because it can handle market action that has a low signal-to-noise ratio caused by a lot of apparently random price movements, price spikes, and countertrend movements mixed in with what to the human eye is a clear market trend. This strategy also demonstrates drawing larger rectangles, whose meanings are described here by this light blue text, which also demonstrates how to write text on a chart at a fixed location.

This strategy, titled “Fibonacci-Weighted Moving Averages (Uses 1-Dimensional Array and Editable Time Series)”, is a moving average crossover system that uses a custom-built “Fibonacci-weighted moving average” instead of one of the moving average functions built into TradeStation® by default, and demonstrates how to use single-dimensional arrays and “Editable Time Series”. The weightings used for the Fibonacci-weighted moving average are calculated up front when the strategy is initialized and stored in a single-dimensional array. On each bar update, the Fibonacci-weighted moving average of the close prices is calculated for the current bar using the weightings in the array and stored in an Editable Time Series, which is plotted as a light blue dotted line on the chart. A long trade is entered if the Fibonacci-weighted moving average is going up and crosses above another Editable Time Series that is a smoothed version of the Fibonacci-weighted moving average, where the smoothing is done by calculating the simple moving average of the Fibonacci-weighted moving average.

This strategy, titled “Counterfactual Trading Logic (Uses Parallel Lists)”, uses the power of lists to create an easily customizable “counterfactual trading logic” system. It acts as a template strategy that allows you to plug in your own entry and exit logic to create a trading strategy that only places actual trades when your preferred number of most recent entry and exit signals “would have” produced trades either above or below your preferred profit level. This strategy uses lists to keep track of what “would have happened” if an actual trade had been entered every time your entry logic triggered and if those actual trades were exited every time your exit logic triggered to create a real-time, up-to-date historical list of possible trades and their hypothetical trading performance. In this strategy, the trades not taken despite the entry signal trigger occurring are referred to as “counterfactual trades” and appear on the chart as thin gray lines between what would have been the entry and exit bars with green and red dotted vertical lines drawn on the signal bars for the counterfactual entry and exit bars. The trades where actual entry and exit orders are placed are referred to as “actual trades” and appear on the chart with the order entry and exit markings and position markings that TradeStation® normally uses, with additional thick light green and pink vertical lines drawn on the signal bars for the actual entry and exit bars. The term “counterfactual trading logic” refers to trading logic that takes into account the performance that “would have been achieved” by the most recent “counterfactual trades” had they been “actual trades”.

To plug in your own entry and exit logic to create a trading strategy that only places actual trades when your preferred number of most recent entry and exit signals “would have” produced trades above or below your preferred profit level, make a copy of this built-in strategy by clicking on it and selecting “Create New Strategy from Copy of This Strategy”, changing its “Strategy Name”, changing its “Strategy Name Used in Quagensia Code Archive File & Folder Names”, and saving the copy to your “My Algos” folder. Then, scroll down to the two yellow comments that start with “Attention paid users and users whose free trials have not expired” and follow the instructions to replace the default entry and exit logic with your own entry and exit logic without code.

For instance, you could create an entry condition that enters a position if the open of the current bar is more than 1% higher than the close of the previous bar as I will now demonstrate.

Let’s copy this entry condition and use it as a starting point for an exit condition.

Then, scroll up to the customizable exit condition set.

Then delete the “Cross Below a Time Series” condition.

Then paste the entry condition over the condition that says “True Is Equal To True”.

Then, you could create an exit condition that exits a position if the open of the current bar is more than 1% lower than the close of the previous bar as I will now demonstrate.

Then, click this button to save your customizations, generate your customized strategy’s code, and copy its code to the clipboard from where you can paste it into TradeStation®.

As a reminder, you can learn how to customize strategies without code in Quagensia T Edition and backtest them in TradeStation® by watching the “Introduction to Quagensia T Edition” video which is on our home page at quagensia.com and is linked to here.

This strategy, titled “Best Month to Trade (Uses Parallel Lists)”, uses the power of lists to create a report that allows you to quickly determine what the best and worst months of the year were to hold a long position for your instrument of choice. Follow the detailed instructions in the “Description & Notes” field here to run the backtest, then copy and paste the strategy’s report results from the EasyLanguage® Print Log into Microsoft Excel and format the report data to create a report that looks something like this.

To customize this report without code to only include the months that more closely match the current market conditions for your instrument of choice, make a copy of this built-in strategy as previously described, then scroll down to the yellow comment that starts with “Attention paid users and users whose free trials have not expired” and follow the instructions to customize the set of conditions here for which price bars should be included in and excluded from the results based on how you see the “current market conditions”. Then, click this button to save your customizations, generate your customized strategy’s code, and copy its code to the clipboard from where you can paste it into TradeStation®.

This strategy, titled “Best Day of Month to Trade (Uses 2-Dimensional Array and Microsoft Excel)”, uses the power of 2-dimensional arrays to create a report that allows you to quickly determine what the best and worst days of the month were to hold a long position for your instrument of choice. Follow the detailed instructions in the “Description & Notes” field here to run the backtest, then copy and paste the strategy’s report results from the EasyLanguage® Print Log into a custom Microsoft Excel workbook that you can download from this strategy’s home page on our website by clicking here and format the report data to create a report that looks something like this.

This strategy, titled “Best Day of Week to Trade (Uses 2-Dimensional Array and Microsoft Excel)”, uses the power of 2-dimensional arrays to create a report that allows you to quickly determine what the best and worst days of the week were to hold a long position for your instrument of choice. Follow the detailed instructions in the “Description & Notes” field here to run the backtest, then copy and paste the strategy’s report results from the EasyLanguage® Print Log into a custom Microsoft Excel workbook that you can download from this strategy’s home page on our website by clicking here, and format the report data to create a report that looks something like this.

As a reminder, all the built-in strategies I have shown you in this video were built without code by clicking choices on a screen. Quagensia T Edition is full of advanced features that enable you to build complex strategies from scratch and make it easy to customize the built-in strategies here and those you download from third parties.

The set of no-code strategies here are tools and utilities that are useful in everyday tested trading.

The two strategies here, titled “Reality Check: Buy and Hold” and “Reality Check: Buy Every X Bars”, act as quick reality checks to ensure that a profitable backtest of a long-only trading strategy isn’t profitable merely because the instrument’s price chart was going up during the backtest period.

For instance, this strategy, titled “Reality Check: Buy Every X Bars”, places long-only trades using logic that clearly has no edge.

Running a backtest of this strategy by adding it to a chart in a “Chart Analysis” window in TradeStation® produces a performance profile in TradeStation®’s “Strategy Performance Report” window that can act as a benchmark with which you can compare the performance profiles of long-only trading strategies with promising backtests that you suspect may have an edge but that you want to make sure at least beat an edgeless long-only strategy on the same instrument between the same start and end dates. You can compare metrics and graphs including risk metrics, equity curves, underwater equity curves, reports that break performance metrics down by year, month, week, and day, and more.

You can also run optimizations of this edgeless trading strategy using many combinations of its “Q X Number of Bars for Initial Wait Period”, ” Q X Number of Bars to be Long”, and “Q X Number of Bars to be Flat” input parameters and compare the performance profiles of its backtests with the best performing parameter sets with those of long-only trading strategies with promising optimization results.

The two strategies here, titled “Reality Check: Sell Short and Hold” and “Reality Check: Sell Short Every X Bars”, act as quick reality checks to ensure that a profitable backtest of a short-only trading strategy isn’t profitable merely because the instrument’s price chart was going down during the backtest period.

The last built-in strategy to discuss is this one, titled “Print Most Recent Price Bar Statistics”. This strategy prints out common price bar statistics for the most recent price bars of an instrument to the EasyLanguage® Print Log. You can quickly and easily use this strategy for a faster way to obtain price bar statistics than manually interacting with the price bars in a TradeStation® chart then manually entering open, high, low, and close price values into a calculator to calculate the statistics manually.

To add your own custom price bar statistics to the “Print Most Recent Price Bar Statistics” strategy, make a copy of this built-in strategy as previously described, then scroll down to the yellow comment that starts with “Attention paid users and users whose free trials have not expired” and follow the instructions to add your own custom price bar statistics here. Then, click this button to save your customizations, generate your customized strategy’s code, and copy its code to the clipboard from where you can paste it into TradeStation®.

The “Print Most Recent Price Bar Statistics” strategy helps you create other Quagensia Strategies that allow you to test some interesting price action that you see at the right edge of a price chart that your intuition tells you is probably bullish or bearish.

You can determine if some price action was bullish, bearish, or non-predictive in the past for a particular instrument or for all similar instruments, for instance every stock in the S&P 500, by quickly creating a Quagensia Strategy based on the price bar statistics you copy and paste from the “Print Most Recent Price Bar Statistics” strategy’s price bar statistics in the EasyLanguage® Print Log. Then you can generate the custom Quagensia Strategy’s code and copy it to the clipboard from where you can paste it into TradeStation®, compile the code, and run a backtest of your strategy by adding it to a chart in TradeStation®.

That’s the end of the quick introductions to each of the built-in strategies in Quagensia T Edition. Since these strategies are open in multiple tabs, I will show you how to work with multiple Quagensia Algos at the same time.

Quagensia has a multi-tab, multi-“tab group” user interface that makes it easy to work with multiple Quagensia Algos at the same time. You can open as many algo tabs as you want in the initial “tab group” in which the Start Page is open as I have already done, and you can also create up to seven more “tab groups” in up to four columns and two rows. This video is less than 2000 pixels wide so it is difficult to show you how nice it looks with algos in multiple columns and multiple rows but watch how I do it here and imagine how it would look spread across multiple monitors or on a large-screen, high-resolution monitor. Using multiple tab groups makes it even easier to copy and paste trading logic between Quagensia Algos, visually compare multiple versions of the same Quagensia Algo side by side, or help you learn Quagensia interactively by opening an algo that you want to learn how to create in a tab group to the right of the main tab group and attempting to recreate it in the main tab group.

Note that when you are working with algos in multiple tab groups, it is the algo in the active algo tab whose algo’s code is generated when you click this button and whose algo is acted upon when you click any of the buttons in the toolbar, select a menu item from the main menu, or do anything else that acts upon the algo in the active algo tab. The active tab is the one that is marked with a gear icon like this one that doesn’t disappear when you move your mouse pointer to a place on the screen that is not on the tab or its contents. You can click anywhere on a tab or its contents to change which algo tab is highlighted as demonstrated here.

That’s the end of our video. Thanks for watching. If you liked it, please let us know by giving this video a like and subscribing to our channel. And if you loved it, please consider sharing this video.

Download the free trial of Quagensia T Edition from quagensia.com to get all our free no-code trading strategies so that you can use them as-is and customize them without code.

And on behalf of our users, thank you to the content creators who take these strategies and run with them and publish their Quagensia Strategies in their own videos. Content creators, if you let us know when you’ve published high-quality Quagensia-enhanced content, we will consider promoting it for free on our website.

Have a great day.