You can define one or more Trading Strategies for your Trading Spec. They make your Spec more manageable by dividing it into sections dedicated to different tasks, such as implementing a trading idea, or targeting a specific market segment, or exploiting a particular market condition, when it arises.

Each strategy contains List Selectors, to select the strategy’s trading lists, Trading Rules to evaluate the shares in the trading lists, and Named Terms. Terms are used by the List Selectors and Trading Rules (and other Terms) to represent values, condition states (i.e. true or false), shares, benchmark share-lists, persistent data and price indicators, which may result from the evaluation of an expression. Using a Named Term allows you to replace lengthy and complex expressions with a simple name that represents the output of the expression. As such, they are a powerful way to reduce the complexity of your Trading Rules, List Selectors and other Named Terms that use them. They also allow you to re-use the expression’s output in multiple places, while only evaluating the underlying expression once.

At minimum, you must define one strategy with one trading rule. This can then be used for back-testing against a single share. If you want to target multiple shares, then you’ll also need to define at least one List Selector to select those shares.

You can also configure your strategy so that it is always evaluated, or you can define a condition whose result determines if the strategy is active (i.e. evaluated) or not. In this way you can design strategies that react to  specific market conditions and opportunities.

1. In the Shared level of the Trading Definition dialog, click the Trading Strategies tab selector if that tab is not already showing
2. In the Operation drop down, select Create and click the Do It! button
3. This will create a trading strategy with a place-holder name e.g. ‘<strategy 1>’ (place-holder names are always delimited with <…>) and open the Trading Spec Definition dialog at the Strategy level, ready to create the List Selectors, Trading Rules and Terms that your strategy will use.

4. The Strategy Activation tab will be showing first, as illustrated above. Here you need to click the Edit button, which will take to the DEfT Wizard, as shown below:

Here you’ll enter the strategy’s name then choose from the following drop-down whether the strategy will always be evaluated, or evaluated when a condition is met. Then click Next. If you chose ‘always evaluated’ then that will be it, otherwise the Wizard will walk you through the process of creating an activation condition for the strategy.

For further information about creating a definition, please refer to the Trading Definition Wizard help topic.

5. Once the strategy name and any activation condition has been defined, it will be displayed as a simple English language statement that shows the strategy’s names and its activation criteria, if any.

6. If you’re happy with the result, click the Exit Wizard button to return to the Trading Spec Definition dialog. There you can click the tabs you need to define the strategy’s components. Please refer to the Named Terms, Trading Rules and List Selectors help topics for more information on this