TradeStation Help

About Strategy Properties

Pyramiding Settings

In TradeStation, pyramiding specifically refers to adding shares/contracts to existing positions within a market. This means that your strategy can generate a buy order when you are already in a long position (or short entry when you are already in a short position). You specify whether or not your trading strategy can add to existing positions, and if so, under what circumstances.

The two pyramiding options are:

• when the order is generated by a different entry order - The trading strategy will ignore all buy or sell orders generated by the same entry that initiated the current open position, but will generate a buy order based on any other entry.
• regardless of the entry that generated the order - The trading strategy will consider all buy or sell opportunities regardless of whether they come from the same entry or not.

Entry Settings

The two entry options are:

• Maximum open entries per position - This setting limits how many open orders a strategy can include in one direction. Once this maximum has been met, TradeStation will ignore any additional entry orders until one or more orders in that position have been closed out. The default is 50.
• Maximum shares/contracts per position - This setting limits the maximum number of contracts or shares that can comprise an open position. Once the maximum number of shares/contracts has been reached, TradeStation will ignore any additional entry orders. The default is 50000.

Maximum Number of Bars Study Will Reference

TradeStation asks you to specify the maximum number of bars a strategy will reference. The default number of bars is 50, and this number will work for most cases; however, you can change this number if you need additional bars or want to use fewer bars.

When you apply an analysis technique to a chart, it requires a certain number of bars to perform its calculations. This setting is called the Maximum Bars Back. For more information, see About the Maximum Bars Back Setting.

The chosen format for any strategy will apply to all strategies contained in the same Chart Analysis window. By default, the properties of the first strategy applied to the chart are used until the user makes a specific change.