BUILD ALPHA
Features List

Intelligent and automatic strategy creation, automated robustness testing and filtering, one-click code generation, portfolio simulations and alternative data.

Features

Output Interface

The output interface allows the trader or money manager to quickly sift through hundreds of generated strategies with the click of a button or arrow keys. Easily navigate the in-sample, out of sample and combined result. View equity curves, drawdowns, and run every strategy through advanced robustness testing capabilities of Build Alpha. The right-hand side of the output interface will be covered in depth below.

Input Interface

Select all your strategy inputs. Symbols, dates, timeframe, entries, exits, risk management, parameter settings, fitness function, and more

Automated Workflows

Set automatic filters based on performance metrics, number of trades, or even pass or failure of specific robustness tests. Only view strategies you want to see. An enormous time saver.

Set Sequence Workflows where each round can have different rules, filters and a date range to test multiple OOS periods reliably.

NEW Intelligence Report

Build Alpha can now review all your saved strategies and make suggestions to automatically help you improve them. You can run the Intelligence Report from the Brokers menu and any strategies with an IR icon have a suggested improvement. Click on the IR icon to view the suggested modification.

Equity Curve and Monte Carlo Equity Curve

View historical strategy performance by date or trade number. Equity curves show how a particular strategy performed during the backtesting period. Red projection bands help set proper expectations and monitor strategy health.

Across Markets

Easily test strategies across additional markets, timeframes, and asset classes to identify potentially overfit or lying backtests.

Vs. Random

Easily compare generated strategies vs. strategies generated with random signals to discern whether generated strategies could be found by random chance (curve-fit) or actually possess some edge greater than could be found by random chance.

Distribution Comparison

View every fitness function’s distribution to avoid trading strategies from poor distributions. Strong predictive edge should show positive skew compared to the random strategies.

Edge Ratio

Edge Ratio or E-Ratio measures how much a trade goes in your favor vs. how much a trade goes against you. The x-axis is the number of bars since the trading signal. A higher y-value signifies more “edge” at that step in time. Easily see when trading edges decay and it is time to exit.

Monte Carlo Tests

Monte Carlo tests are a powerful feature that allows the trader/money manager to set proper expectations around risk and uncertainty. Identify realistic performance paths and drawdown measures prior to risking real capital.

Variance Testing

Variance testing is a unique forward simulator to see how well a trading strategy should do over the next N trades with varying win rates. It creates hypothetical equity curves into the future based on the distribution of the backtest results. The trader can predetermine how much to vary the win rate, how many trades into the future to look, and the number of simulations to run.

Case Study

The left chart’s blue line and the right chart’s blue line are the same backtest results. Alone, the backtest looks like a viable strategy. However, after running the Variance Test, we can conclude these results are unlikely to happen again.

Noise Test

This test creates 1,000 synthetic price series with altered noise (volatility) and then re-trades the strategy 1,000 times on the new noise adjusted data. Does changing the noise affect strategy performance?

Intraday Checks

Optimize any intraday trading strategy to find the ideal times of day to trade, maximum or minimum P&L per day, or total amount of trades to take per day.

Equity Curve Trading

Can we improve performance analyzing the patterns in a trading strategy results? Maybe risk-adjusted returns improve by adding an overlay or meta system on top.

Delayed Entries and Exits

A simple, but often overlooked, robustness test is to delay the entries and/or exits to determine how sensitive a trading strategy may be to these changes.

Live Strategy Monitoring

Connect Build Alpha to various brokers and data providers to monitor real-time strategy positions, live P&L, receive alerts, and tons more for all your saved strategies and portfolios. Connections include TradeStation, Interactive Brokers, and more.

Generated Code

Build Alpha generates code for any strategy for TradeStation, TradingView, MultiCharts, NinjaTrader8, MetaTrader4, MetaTrader5, Python, Interactive Brokers, Pro Real Time and more. Copy and paste to live trade on a simulated or real account.

Seasonality Breakdown

View complete breakdowns of seasonal strengths and weaknesses of any strategy. Uncover seasonal edges to exploit or right-click to Add a Rule to prevent trading during seasonally weak periods.

Advanced Optimization

Optimize parameters and conduct strategy parameter sensitivity analysis. Build Alpha permits adding noise adjusted data into the optimization process to discover more robust parameter settings.

Mean Variance Analysis

Mean variance optimization allows the trader to discover optimal weights in order to optimize your portfolio’s risk adjusted return or Sharpe Ratio. Answer the question, “does this strategy improve my portfolio?”

Correlation Matrix

The Correlation Matrix allows traders the ability to view how correlated individual strategies have been. This gives the trader or the money manager the ability to construct portfolios of uncorrelated strategies.

Randomized Out of Sample Testing

Out of Sample Testing can be easily passed when the underlying data exhibits a strong trend during the out of sample period. Randomized out of sample presents a solution for this pitfall.

Ensembles and Hedging

Strategies that use other strategies as input signals. Create voting systems among your portfolio strategies to reduce overfitting and smooth performance.

Rebalance Strategies

Rank your symbol universe and only apply your strategy to the top (or bottom) ranked symbols.

Regime Switching Models

Most strategies go flat when there is no trading signal. Build Alpha enables traders to test parking free cash in another asset until a new trading signal is generated.

Signal Breakdown

Learn what signals occur most often during winning or losing trades to better modify and adjust your trading strategies.

Create Custom Signals

Build Alpha has over 7,000 entry and exit signals – all point and click. However, you can now add your own signals to test using the signal editor or python.

Add Custom Signals Prompt

Describe full indicators and signals in plain English and the connected AI model will convert to native Build Alpha signals. Custom signals can be used throughout the software and are added to generated code ready for export.

Multi-strategy Portfolio Simulation

Build Alpha’s portfolio mode enables traders to save strategies, combine them, analyze asset allocation methods, optimize rebalancing techniques and more. Don’t just build strategies, but learn how they co-exist, interact and can benefit each other. Full testing of shared account, strategy weighting, each strategy can utilize different sizing method, ranking method and more.

Organize strategies by color, add custom notes, test and monitor them separately but all from one dashboard.

Portfolio Suggest (AI)

Build Alpha’s Portfolio Suggest feature is a single button that enables Build Alpha’s AI, that was trained on thousands of strategies and market environments, to sift through your saved strategies and suggest the best sizing method, exit modes, combination of strategies, weightings, and more so you do not have to test every combination yourself.