Welcome to RuleTrader!  The two parts of this Tutorial are designed to familiarise you with all aspects of the system as quickly as possible. Along the way you’ll learn how to:

• Create an automated investment system
• Back-test your system
• Review the results of the back-test and evolve your system
• Solve problems with your trading system
• Batch-test variants of your system
• Deploy your system for live trading

RuleTrader is a completely new type of product. It works in your language – English – to make it very easy to create automated trading systems that harness the power of your computer to find investment opportunities and manage your positions. RuleTrader saves you a great deal of time, energy and trouble, while allowing you to back-test and refine your investment approach, to maximise your profits.

Like anything new, there are a few things to learn and this tutorial is designed to get you up to speed as quickly as possible. Please stick with it. By following this guide to creating your first trading system, you’ll quickly discover that RuleTrader takes you by the hand and everything becomes easier, and very rewarding, as you progress.

To assist you, links are included throuughout the tutorial to Help articles that provide further information on each topic. Feel free to explore these. And don’t forget, you can contact RuleTrader support with any questions you may have, using the Contact Support button on the Technical Support tab of the Dashboard, or the technical support option in the Account menu on this website, or by emailing us at support@ruletrader.co.uk. We’re only too happy to help.

The first thing we’ll do is create Trend Trader v1.00. Though this system and its variants are already provided for you in RuleTrader Test (they’re called Tutorial v1.00 and v1.01), we strongly recommend creating at least the first variant yourself, as it will teach you the key skills you need to build your own investment system.

Trend Trader v1.00 will pick a target trading list of the top 100 companies with mkt cap over £50M, average spread below 2%, ROCE over 12% and the fastest price growth over the last 6 months. It’s designed to use RuleTrader’s unique AutoTrend feature to open a position when the price has just started reversing out of a low and will sell it when the long term trend starts falling.

RuleTrader has two parts: RuleTrader Test and RuleTrader Live, which correspond to the RuleTrader Test and Live layouts that have been installed in ShareScope for you. We’ll create and test the system using RuleTrader Test. Later we’ll show you, as an example, how to import it for live trading in RuleTrader Live (though obviously you shouldn’t use such a simple system for live trading). You can build the Trend Trader v1.00 system by following these simple steps:

1. Navigate to the RuleTrader Test Layout using ShareScope’s Window > Change Layout menu option or, if you have it enabled (worth doing), by clicking the RuleTrader Test layout button on ShareScope’s tool-bar (usually at the top or bottom of the ShareScope main window)
2. On the panel in the top-left corner of the main chart in RuleTrader Test’s layout, click the Dashboard button. You may need to expand the panel first by clicking it.

3. The Dashboard dialog that opens is RuleTrader’s main control interface. The buttons down the left hand side act as tab selectors. Click a few now, to see how the controls in the centre panel of the Dashboard change with each tab.

4. To create your Trend Trader system, click on the Test System tab button in the top left of the Dashboard. On this tab is the Trading System group, which has all the buttons you need for creating, editing and managing your investment systems, which are called Trading Specifications. At this stage it’s worth noting:
   • ‘Trading system’ and ‘investment system’ are used interchangeably in RuleTrader. In both cases they refer to an automated system used to invest in shares and other instruments, with positions typically held for weeks, months or years. RuleTrader is not designed for day-trading, where positions are held for less than a day.
   • Though we often refer to shares, RuleTrader can be used with any tradeable entity in the ShareScope database, such as shares, foreign-exchange rates, ETFs, indices, bonds, etc. Formally, we call company equity ‘shares’ and non-company equity ‘instruments’. Collectively, we refer to both ‘shares’ and ‘instruments’ as ‘securities’ but often we display a shocking lack of pedantry by just calling everything ‘shares’.
5. In the Trading System group, select ‘Tutorial v1.00’ from the drop-down Specification list then click the Show button below the list, which will display the ‘Tutorial v1.00’ Trading Specification in the ShareScript Console. This is what we’ll be re-creating, so take a moment to have a look at it. You’ll see that a Trading Specification comprises:
   • an optional Trading Universe of securities that may be of interest to your investment system, which is obtained by filtering the shares and instruments in one of ShareScope’s lists. Using it can significantly speed up back-tests, as it reduces the number of securities that RuleTrader must deal with.
   • one or more Trading Strategies, which contain:
     • Named Terms that may represent values, conditions, shares or share lists. These are used by…
     • Trading Rules to determine when positions should be opened or closed, if at all, in a trading list of shares selected by…
     • List Selectors, which select the trading list of shares that the strategy may wish to trade. These originate from either the Trading Universe, or one or more ShareScope security lists or portfolios