When you’ve evolved your Trading Spec and have grown confident in its performance, you’ll want to import it into RuleTrader Live and let it find opportunities and manage positions for you. This is where RuleTrader delivers its greatest benefits, saving you a great deal of time, trouble and effort, while keeping you on top of the market, so you’re able to benefit from opportunities as soon as they present themselves.

We’ll show you how this is done using the Trend Trader v1.01 Trading Spec. Obviously this is only for learning purposes; we don’t recommend using a Spec so unsophisticated for live trading:

1. Switch to the RuleTrader Live layout using ShareScope’s Window > Change Layout menu option, or the tool-bar button for RuleTrader Live, if you have it set-up
2. On the Console you’ll see RuleTrader switches to the Live session, then says it must be initialised for first time-use. There are three steps to this, which must be executed in the following order (RuleTrader will refuse to set up a Trading Account until steps (a) and (b) are completed):
   1. Import the Trading Specification
   2. Start the Live system by executing the Trading Specification
   3. Set up the live Trading Account and link it to a ShareScope portfolio and cash account
3. The first step is to import Trend Trader, so open the Live Dashboard by clicking Start Live in the Chart panel. In the Live System tab, click Import/Export. In the ‘Import Trading Specification From Test Session’ group at the top of the Import/Export dialog, select ‘Trend Trader v1.01’ then click the Import button next to that drop-down list:

4. Click Ok to leave the Import/Export dialog and return to the Dashboard and you’ll see Trend Trader v1.01 is selected as the Live Trading Spec. Note that, if you already had a Specification selected for live trading, you’ll be able to import another Spec but it won’t automatically be made the live spec unless you specifically select it. To ensure continuity, RuleTrader will always assumes that you want to continue with your current live Spec unless you explicitly tell it otherwise.
5. Click Ok again to exit the Dashboard and RuleTrader will start running the new live Trading Spec, by initiating the selection of its Trading List. It will then report that no Trading Account was set up so it cannot raise any trading-signals.
6. So the next step is to create a RuleTrader Trading Account and link it to some ShareScope Portfolios and Cash Accounts. When RuleTrader was installed, a RuleTrader Example Portfolio and a RuleTrader Example Cash Account were also installed into ShareScope, which we’ll now link to the RuleTrader Trading Account.

A RuleTrader Trading Account can be linked to one, and only one, ShareScope cash account and a ShareScope cash account cannot be linked to more than one RuleTrader Trading Account i.e. there must be a 1-to-1 correspondence.

When you come to import your own trading system into RuleTrader Live you’ll be able to link your RuleTrader Trading Accounts to your existing ShareScope portfolios and cash-accounts. Any open positions you have in those portfolios will be seamlessly imported into RuleTrader, where you’ll be able to assign them to a Trading Strategy in your Trading Spec. That strategy will then monitor your positions for you.

7. For now, click on the Trading Accounts tab button and then click the Create button to create your Trading Account. In the ‘Create Trading Account’ dialog that appears, enter e.g. Tutorial, as the account name and then select the RuleTrader Example Cash Account, then click Ok:

8. In the ‘Creating ‘Tutorial’ Trading Account’ dialog that appears, you would generally have the option to specify one or more portfolios to link to your trading account. However, this option is only available if the cash account is not attached to a portfolio. In ShareScope, a single portfolio can be attached to a cash account, so that trades entered in that portfolio will always use that cash account. The RuleTrader Example Portfolio and Cash Account are already attached, so the dialog will show that only the Example Portfolio can be linked to this Trading Account.

If they weren’t attached, then you would be presented with a list of portfolios that can be linked to the Trading Account and you could link multiple portfolios to the account, if you wished. When you enter trades into RuleTrader, you’d then be asked which portfolio you wanted to use with the  trade.

If you’d like to try this out, you can click Cancel now, then open the ShareScope cash account window for the RuleTrader Example Cash Account, then select the ShareScope menu options Cash > Change attachment and uncheck the option Attach to only one portfolio. Then resume this tutorial from step 7.

9. All other settings you can leave, as is. If you’d like more information on them, please refer to the Creating An Account and Live Account Integration With ShareScope Help topics.

9. Once you’re done, please click Ok. You’ll then see a dialog asking if you want to ‘Begin Data Import?’. Click Start Import and RuleTrader will then sync with your selected cash account and portfolio(s) and import the data they contain including any initial funding transactions. It will then display in the console the start-date it has picked (the date immediately after the initial credit in the cash account) and the account’s opening-balance (the value of the credit).
10. When the sync is complete, you’ll be taken back to the Dashboard. Click Ok to close it.

RuleTrader will continue executing the Trend Trader Trading Spec. Provided the market is open and you have the intraday data feed connected, it will automatically update the RuleTrader Rules and RuleTrader Signals columns in the Share List window. However, because of the way ShareScope works, this may take 30 – 60 seconds.

If you wish to speed things up, or if you’re not connected to the feed, then right-click on each column’s header and select Refresh Script (or Edit Column, if Refresh Script is not available) in each case. Doing this will remove the sort order for the RuleTrader Signals column, which you must restore by double-clicking on its column header twice (so the little arrow head in the column header is pointing upwards). Doing this ensures signals are displayed at the top of the list (the order is determined by the number added to the start of each label in the column).

Apologies if this sounds a bit complicated. It’s just the way ShareScope works. You’ll find you quickly get used to it. Often you’ll only need to do this with the RuleTrader Signals column.

If the market is open, Trend Trader may already be recommending some trades, in the RuleTrader Signals column, for some shares, as shown below (the Rules column displays the rule that raised the signal). All other shares, which have been selected for the Trend Trader Trading List, will simply show the name of the Trend Trader Trading Strategy (e.g. ‘Trendy’, or whatever name you chose for it), whose List Selector selected them:

So now you can see how quick and easy it is to review your trading signals – it takes just seconds to glance at the RuleTrader Signals column. That makes it entirely practicable to review your opportunities on a daily basis, so you’ll be able to seize opportunities, as they happen, and take advantage of your biggest advantage over the financial institutions – your speed.

When a trade is signalled, select the share with the signal in the Share List, then click on the Trade Share button in the Chart’s panel, which will take you to the Trade Entry dialog. This displays the signal in more detail, to tell you how many shares to buy, in which trading accounts. Then make the trade with your broker and enter the price into the dialog, along with the broker’s fees (if they are different from the defaults you set up).

Then hit the Recalculate Total button to update the Stamp Duty. Check the displayed total matches the total quoted by your broker. If it matches, then click the Enter Trade button. If any more trading accounts are signalled for this trade, then the dialog will redisplay, with the details already set up for the next account.

This tells RuleTrader you now have  / don’t have a position in that share, so it knows to start / stop monitoring the position for you. It’s super simple and the job is quickly done. For further information on the Trade Entry dialog, please review the Help article here.

If you need to change the details of any trade you have entered, please do so in ShareScope’s Transactions window. Then click the Sync Accounts button in the Trading Accounts tab to re-re-synchronise RuleTrader with ShareScope.

Each time you restart ShareScope and the RuleTrader Live session, after a number of days have passed since the last session, the system will perform a Live System Catch-up. To do this, it runs through each trading day since the last completed trading day (the last day that was rolled-over), doing all the things it would have done if RuleTrader had been running on those days. If it has been a while since you ran RuleTrader, then the catch-up can take a few minutes. The best way to avoid this delay is to either leave ShareScope and RuleTrader running on your PC, or check-in once each day so the system only has one day to catch-up.

That’s it! You now know everything you need to use RuleTrader to build your own automated investment system. Thank you so much for following this tutorial through to its end. We hope you’ll find the time spent pays off handsomely for you in the future and is more than repaid in terms of the time saved, when finding opportunities and managing your investments.

If there is anything we can do to help you in your journey with RuleTrader, including any advice you may need on the mechanics of creating and refining your particular system, please don’t hesitate to contact us using any of the methods detailed here. If you have any suggestions on how we might improve RuleTrader, or if there are any features you’d like to see added, then please drop us a note at suggestions@ruletrader.co.uk

We wish you the very best investment success.