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Last updated on January 22, 2019 by Tomas Vanek
Strategy style
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StrategyQuant X allows you to choose from 3 different strategy “styles”. By style we mean how the strategy is constructed.
Every trading strategy consists of set of IF – THEN rules, managing IF something happens THEN do some action. There are however some differences in how exactly these rules are constructed.
SQ3 (old) style
In previous version of SQ the generated strategies looked like this:
LONG ENTRY RULE: IF Long Entry Conditions THEN Open Long order SHORT ENTRY RULE: IF Short Entry Conditions THEN Open Short order LONG EXIT RULE: IF Long Exit Conditions THEN Close Long order SHORT EXIT RULE: IF Short Exit Conditions THEN Close Short order
It is a simple and logical format, but what if both Long and Short conditions are valid at the same time?
Then you’d have to open both Long and Short order, or the Short order cancels the Long one.
Or what if both Long entry and Long exit conditions are valid at the same time? Then you wouldn’t know whether to entry of exit.
This leads to problems that are covered by the new SQ X architecture.
SQ X new style
In SQ X new architecture the first rule is a special Signal rule that checks all the trading conditions. The rest of the rules then check the produced trading signals and open or close trades. The strategy looks like this:
SIGNAL RULE: LongEntrySignal = Long Entry Conditions ShortEntrySignal = Short Entry Conditions LongExitSignal = Long Exit Conditions ShortExitSignal = Short Exit Conditions LONG ENTRY RULE: IF LongEntrySignal = true and ShortEntrySignal = false and LongExitSignal = false THEN Open Long order SHORT ENTRY RULE: IF ShortEntrySignal = true and LongEntrySignal = false and ShortExitSignal = false THEN Open Short order LONG EXIT RULE: IF LongExitSignal = true and LongEntrySignal = false THEN Close Long order SHORT EXIT RULE: IF ShortExitSignal = true and ShortEntrySignal = false THEN Close Short order
SQ X new style with Fuzzy Logic
A modification of the new rule is to employ fuzzy logic, the only difference from previous type is in Signal rule. Normally the conditions for the signal are connected with AND and OR.
The typical signal in a standard trading strategy could be something like:
SIGNAL RULE: LongEntrySignal = ((CCI(14) > 0) and (RSI(20) > 50)) or ((MACD(10, 20, 30) > 0) and Hammer Candle Pattern))
With fuzzy logic we are adding possibility to evaluate all the conditions, and let some of them be wrong, while still having valid signal.
SIGNAL FUZZY RULE LongEntrySignal (70% of the conditions below must be true): CCI(14) > 0 RSI(20) > 50 MACD(10, 20, 30) > 0 Hammer Candle Pattern
Note that we don’t use any AND or ORs here, all conditions are evaluated.
With fuzzy rules you define one more thing – how big % of all the conditions has to be right to have the whole signal still valid.
In our case we have four conditions, and 70% of them (which means 3 conditions out of 4) have to be true. So if any three of those four conditions are true, LongEntrySignal will be true.
Using fuzzy rules makes sense only if you’ll let program generate more than just 2-3 sub-conditions in every signal, it doesn’t make much sense if you’ll have only 2 or 3 conditions in a signal.
But imagine if your LongEntrySignal consists of 10 conditions. Fuzzy logic can be seen as “voting”, and majority of the conditions in the right direction will determine the outcome of the signal.
This opens new possibilities for strategies creation.
Custom strategy templates
Customization is a big power of StrategyQuant. You are not limited to these three predefined styles. Custom templates allow you to create a “template” of your strategy architecture, and then generate strategies according to this template.
Please check an article Developing strategies using custom strategy templates for more information.
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