The System Settings in this tab affect how RuleTrader evaluates your Trading Specification. They are:

• Ignore announced results (only use final for year-end): If checked, then any terms or trading rules in your Trading Spec that use a company’s year-end results (as opposed to interim results), will only use the finalised year-end results. Otherwise, the announced results will be used as soon as they are available.
• Trade accounts with the same currency as the share first (overrides trade priority): With multiple trading accounts, buy trades are normally executed in order of the account’s trading priority (see Creating/Editing An Account’s Details), even if that account is holding a different currency than the traded share’s price currency. If this setting is checked, then trading priority is overridden, so those accounts holding the same currency as the share are traded first (in priority order). If none of those accounts have cash then the remaining trading accounts are used (again in priority order)
• Allow strategies to increase, decrease, or close a position opened by another strategy: If a share has an existing position, then RuleTrader normally only evaluates trading rules (e.g. to increase, decrease or sell the position) in the trading strategy that opened the position. By checking this setting, all appropriate trading rules in all strategies are evaluated for the share. This can be very useful if, for example, you have a strategy dedicated to monitoring macro market movements, which you want to use to sell all positions, opened by any strategy, when there is a major risk-off event.
• Show buy trade-signals, even if there is insufficient cash for the trade: Normally, when a buy trading rule is triggered, its trade-signal is suppressed if there is insufficient cash in any accounts to execute the trade. Checking this setting disables this suppression, so signals are always displayed irrespective of cash. This can be useful if you think you may ever want to release cash to pursue a new opportunity by closing positions, even if your trading system has not signalled their closure.
• Show trade RISK field in trade entry dialog: By checking this setting an extra numeric field is displayed in the Trade Entry dialog where you can assign a risk to a buy trade. This risk can then be queried in your Trading Specification, e.g. to adjust the behaviour of sell rules based on the riskiness of a position. Note that you can also define the buy rule such that trade risk is automatically assigned by the rule, when it is executed.
• Show trade CATEGORY field in trade entry dialog: Like the trade RISK field, checking this adds a text category field to the Trade Entry dialog, allowing you to assign one or more (separated by commas) category labels to a trade. Again these can be queried in your Trading Spec and can also be automatically assigned by the buy rule
• Represent each day’s price using the __ price: It’s useful to have a single daily price for a share, rather than the Open, High, Low, Close (OHLC) price range that is quoted for each day in ShareScope’s historical prices database. The way this Day’s Price is calculated, from the OHLC prices, is determined by a selecting an option from the drop-down
• Assume share is delisted if missing last __ trading days, or more, of price data: Specify the number of days without prices, after which a share is deemed to have been delisted
• Actual trade-size must be at least __ % of the target size: This setting allows a degree of fuzziness in your trade-sizing calculations. By allowing purchases when the available cash is at least this percentage of the calculated trade-size, you avoid missed buys that leave unproductive cash sitting in your trading account. Another way of avoiding this problem is to use RuleTrader’s smart percentage trade sizing system, defined in the Trade Sizing tab of the Dashboard
• Path to Windows directory: When you install RuleTrader it makes the assumption that your Windows directory is located on your computer’s C: drive at C:\Windows. If this is not the case, then please alter the path here

On the right-hand side of the System Settings tab you’ll notice some additional buttons, which provide access to sub-dialogs containing more advanced and subject-specific settings. These are:

• AutoTrend Settings: Settings that control the operation of RuleTrader’s unique AutoTrend system
• Advanced Settings: We recommend you leave these settings unchanged
• Resource Settings: Use these settings to control the amount of your computer’s resources used by RuleTrader