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, subject to the usual lag (see Company Results Lag).
• Allow strategies to increase, decrease, or close a position opened by another strategy: If a share has an existing position, then normally RuleTrader 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.
• Allow foreign exchange rates to be traded with a spread of __ : Normally RuleTrader considers exchange rates to be non-tradeable and prevents them being considered by trading rules. If you do trade ForEx then you can override this behaviour by checking this setting and defining a default spread to use in back-tests, when currencies are traded.
• Allow indices to be traded with a spread of __ : Sometimes it’s useful in back-tests to allow trading rules to trade market indices, for example when you are using RuleTrader to investigate the behaviour of markets as a whole. Check this setting to enable this and to specify the default spread to use
• Evaluate indices and their overlays __: It’s a good idea to ensure your Trading Spec always includes a non-tradeable market index in the trading list (you’ll need to ensure that ‘Allow indices to be traded’, above, is unchecked). This ensures that it’s overlay history will cover the entire test period (unlike other shares, whose overlays  are only updated in the periods when they are selected for the trading list).

This setting allows you to specify when in the evaluation cycle you want those overlay values to be calculated (bearing in mind that sell rules are always evaluated for shares with positions, before buy rules are evaluated for shares without positions, as described in Important Information About Overlays). For example, if you have an overlay that tracks total capital over time, you may want to update it after sells but before buys.

• 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 list.
• 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, as described 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:

• Test Assumptions: Settings allowing you to view and alter the assumptions RuleTrader makes when back-testing. Normally you would not need to alter these
• AutoTrend Settings: Settings that control the operation of RuleTrader’s unique AutoTrend price-channel tracking 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