Week #1 Lesson 1 - Hello World!

First, we must gain a fundamental understanding of how TradeStation works with EasyLanguage. We do that with a very simple program called Hello World. We also discover variables and start learning a critical skill that will aid in creating and debugging strategies.

Week #1 Lesson 2 - Reserved Words & Price Data

Here we build upon knowledge by introducing the concept of Reserved Words which are built-in commands which make our life easier. I also show you how to access price data elements of the instrument you're trading.

Week #1 Lesson 3 - Your First Strategy

Let's build your first strategy! This will be a moving average strategy on a 15-minute chart. In this lesson, we'll learn about placing buy/sell orders and branching conditions - the real heart of computer programs.

Week #1 Lesson 4 - Input Declarations, Historical Bars and Daily Filters

In this final lesson, we take our strategy up a notch by converting critical values to inputs. This allows us to use TradeStation optimization feature to test different values. We learn to access historical price data to better filter entry points. Finally, we discover a simple technique to access the daily close which proves to be a solid filter.

Week #1 Lesson 5 - Apple Chart Basics

Not sure how to set up a chart in TradeStation for the first week's homework assignment? No problem. Here is how to do it using TradeStation 9.5.

Week #1 Assignments

Week #2 Lesson 1 - The Double Seven Strategy

This is a great price action based strategy for the stock index markets. Simple to code but does introduce two new EasyLanguage Reserved Words which will make our coding jobs super easy.

Week #2 Lesson 2 - Key Reversal Strategy

This price action strategy is a bit more complex but we can handle it! Once you understand this strategy you'll have a good idea on how to build many other price action based strategies.

Week #2 Lesson 3 - Bull/Bear Regime Filter

This is a very simple yet powerful technique that I use all the time to help determine the best market condition to trade a strategy. It can also be used to help make the strategy more adaptive to the changing market. More on that later!

Week #2 Assignments

Week #3 Lesson 1 - Momentum Market Testing

We are going to perform a market study on the S&P. Our goal is to help narrow our search for what type of strategy will work well on the S&P. We'll first start our market study by testing the momentum characteristics of this market. That is, does the S&P exhibit trend following or momentum characteristics on a short-term basis.

Week #3 Lesson 2 - Mean Reversion Market Testing

We'll now test the S&P market to see if it exhibits mean reversion characteristics.

Week #3 Lesson 3 - A Simple Mean Reversion Strategy

With the knowledge we just gained, we can now attempt to build a simple mean reversion trading model for the S&P. We use the RSI indicator for trade entry and a moving average for our exit signal.

Week #3 Assignments

Week #4 Lesson 1 – TradeStation Built-In Exits

What's a trading system without stops? Discover the TradeStation built-in stops and targets that can be applied to your strategy. Then learn how to use TradeStation's built-in stops-and-targets strategy to quickly test various exits.

Week #4 Lesson 2 - How To Use For-Loops

For-Loops are an integral part of all programming languages. Learn how to use them to make your code cleaner and more dynamic.

Week #4 Lesson 3 - Building Adaptive Strategies

Build strategies that adapt to changing market conditions. With this simple technique you can take your strategy building skills to the next level by creating strategies that adapt to the current market conditions.

Week #4 Assignments

Week #5 Lesson 1 - Accessing Multiple Data Streams

It's simple in EasyLanguage to access information other than the price of the market you're trading. Understanding how to do this opens up nearly countless possibilities for building trading models. In this lesson, you'll learn how to take your strategy building skills to the next level by accessing multiple data streams.

Week #5 Lesson 2 – $TRIN Strategy

Learn to build a trading model that uses a market internal (TRIN Index) to generate trading signals. Learning to use information other than the price of the market you're trading is a fantastic skill that will help you in building trading models that work in the real world.

Week #5 Lesson 3 – Intermarket Analysis & Bond Trading Strategy

Intermarket analysis is a study of how one market impacts another market. As traders we want to discover powerful relationships that might help us predict when a trading opportunity is before us. In this lesson I show you a simple technique to build a robust strategy by using only two moving averages.

Week #5 Assignments

Week #6 Lesson 1 - Creating Your First Function

Functions are used by nearly all computer languages and for good reason! They greatly improve the readability and reusability of your code. So, understanding and utilizing functions properly is an absolute must for any serious computer programmer. This lesson will introduce you to functions as we create our first function.

Week #6 Lesson 2 - Using Parameters In Your Function

One important feature of functions is the ability to pass parameters into them. This makes our function flexible by providing custom results based upon the needs of the calling strategy.

Week #6 Lesson 3 - Passing Parameters By Reference

This topic is an advanced topic but such a valuable one! Traditionally functions pass back a Return Value to the calling strategy. But here we learn how we can pass back even more information. This makes our functions even more valuable. This lesson is a must-know for those who want to fully leverage the power of functions.

Week #6 Lesson 4 - Switch/Case Statement Branching

We're all familiar with If-Then statements to make decisions. Well, there is another way to do and that's with a Switch statement. Which one to use in your code? An if-then-else statement can test expressions based on ranges of values or conditions, whereas a switch statement tests expressions based only on a single value. Overall, often Switch statements can be more code efficient and some people think they are clearer for the reader.

Week #6 Assignments

Week #7 Lesson 1 - Getting Started With Breakout Strategies

Many people make good money trading breakout strategies. Breakout strategies are a popular and well-known type of strategy that every EasyLanguage should know how to code. In this lesson, we review what exactly is a breakout strategy and code-up a simple channel breakout.

Week #7 Lesson 2 - Breakout Strategies On Daily Charts

There are several well known indicators which can be used as breakout strategies on daily timeframes. These are Keltner Channels and Bollinger Bands. In this lesson we'll code these two strategies.

Week #7 Lesson 3 - Intraday Breakout Strategies

Building intraday breakout strategies has many rewards including profitable systems that can work today. However, coding these strategies gets a bit more difficult! As an EasyLanguage programmer you must understand how your platform works to avoid several of the pitfalls. In this lesson we code-up the Crabel Stretch breakout method as I'll highlight some of the common pitfalls.

Week #7 Lesson 4 - Improving Performance With Filters

Most breakout strategies will not work with just the breakout logic. You'll need to add filters to your breakout strategy to help pinpoint the most optimal conditions to open trades. These filters can be based upon price, time or even market internals. Here we explore a simple price based filter to help improve our Crabel strategy.

Week #7 Assignments

Week #8 Lesson 1 - Function Gotchas!

Functions in TradeStation have a couple of unique characteristics that can be really confusing for new programmers. If you see your function exhibiting strange behavior you'll want to review this lesson. In this lesson we cover the differences between Series and Simple functions. Knowing this information could save you a lot of frustration in the future!

Week #8 Lesson 2 - Writing Data To A File

Writing data to a file so you can import it into Excel is a great skill to have. You can often use EasyLanguage and TradeStation to create market studies that produce excellent data but, how do you best present it? Well, you import it into Excel and create graphs and charts. This is a great skill to know when you want to dig deeper into market behavior.

Week #8 Lesson 3 – How To Test Your Strategy On Live Data

Do you want to test your newly created strategy without putting money on the line? Of course you do! Here is what I do to all new strategies. I load them on a chart so they can trade on live market data. This data is then sent to a spreadsheet where it can be saved. I'm trapping live market data before it gets adjusted over time by the exchange. This is a great tool to help prevent you from losing money on a strategy that is not ready for the live market.

Week #8 Assignments

Week #9 Lesson 1 - Rapid Testing A Regime Filter

In this lesson we learn how using functions and TradeStation's optimization feature can dramatically speed up your strategy development process. This technique also makes your strategy development more consistent as you issue function calls to perform various component testing of your strategy. Let's start out with building a regime filter function.

Week #9 Lesson 2 - Rapid Testing Exits

Let's continue to build our library of testing functions by creating a function for testing different exits.

Week #9 Lesson 3 – Congratulations & What’s Next?

Congratulations! You've completed EasyLanguage Mastery. Job Well Done! Learning EasyLanguage is a great step forward in becoming a successful system trader. In this brief final video I talk about what we learned and what's next for you on your journey as a strategy programmer!

Final Quiz

Your Feedback

Week #1 Q&A 1

Our first live Q&A! During this 60-minute session, I code up our homework assignments and review several of the quiz questions which were causing the most problems.

Week #1 Q&A 2

In this video I go over all the homework examples in detail.

Week #2 Q&A 1

Lots of great material covered this video. If you're having trouble with the homework, you're going to want to watch this video.

Week #2 Q&A 2

Recorded with a different group of students as we cover common issues.

Week #3 Q&A 1

This is an hour of homework review and answering questions.

Week #3 Q&A 2

Another great review of the material and common questions.

Week #4 Q&A 1

This is an hour of homework review and answering questions.

Week #4 Q&A 2

Another recording where we review homework and answer questions.

Week #5 Q&A 1

Week #6 Q&A 1

Watch this to simplify Assignment #6

Week #7 Q&A 1

Week #8 Q&A #1