How the Builder Works

The chart decides nothing, the Builder does

A Backtrex strategy lives in two places that must not be confused.

The chart is your workbench. You put indicators, zones and structures on it, exactly as you would on any trading platform. It is there for you to see.

The Builder, the panel on the right, is your strategy. It lists the conditions that open and close your trades. Only what is listed there drives the backtest.

An indicator sitting on the chart but used in no condition is a visual aid, nothing more. It changes no result.

The anatomy of a strategy

The Builder is organised by direction. A selector at the top switches between Buy (long) and Sell (short). Each direction holds:

• an Entry section: when to open a trade;
• an Exit section: when to close it — optional if you use a Stop Loss or Take Profit.

Below, pinned to the bottom of the panel, Money Management gathers the risk per trade, the Stop Loss, the Take Profit and the R:R ratio. It is shared between both directions.

You do not have to fill everything. A long-only strategy is perfectly valid.

Conditions

A condition is a statement checked on every closed candle. It comes in three forms.

Comparison

Confronts two criteria, or a criterion and a value.

RSI < 30
Close > EMA 200
Volume > Volume average

Available operators: >, <, >=, <=, =, ≠.

The left-hand criterion is always an indicator or a price. The right-hand side is a number, or another criterion.

Crossover

Captures the exact moment two criteria cross.

EMA 20 crosses above EMA 50
MACD crosses below its signal line

The difference with a comparison is decisive. EMA 20 > EMA 50 stays true throughout an uptrend — hundreds of candles. EMA 20 crosses above EMA 50 is true on one single candle.

Use crossovers to trigger, comparisons to filter.

Signal

Some events stand on their own — they compare to nothing, they simply happen.

Family	Examples
Candlesticks / Figures	Engulfing, Hammer, Doji, Double top, Divergences
Zones	Order Blocks, Fair Value Gaps, Supply / Demand
Structure	Swing Points, Break of Structure, Change of Character, Trend
Liquidity	Equal Highs/Lows, Liquidity Sweep, Liquidity Grab
Time	Session filter, Kill Zones, Economic calendar

Combining conditions: AND and OR

AND — all must be true

Click Add another condition and it stacks below the previous one, joined by AND. All stacked conditions must be true on the same candle.

RSI < 30
AND  Close > EMA 200
AND  London Kill Zone active

Each condition added reduces the number of trades. That is the point of filtering — but a strategy that drops from 400 to 12 trades is no longer statistically testable.

OR — an alternative scenario

Click Add another scenario to create a second, independent possibility. Either one being entirely true is enough to trigger.

Scenario 1 : RSI < 30  AND  Close > EMA 200
OR
Scenario 2 : Bullish Order Block  AND  New York Kill Zone active

Inside a scenario, everything is AND. Between scenarios, everything is OR. That two-level structure expresses almost every discretionary strategy, with no parentheses to manage.

Two settings that change everything

Each criterion carries two badges.

Multi-timeframe

By default a criterion is evaluated on the chart's timeframe. You can force another one, which is how multi-timeframe strategies are built without leaving your chart:

Close > EMA 200 (D1)     ← the underlying trend, daily
AND  RSI < 30 (M15)      ← the entry point, 15 minutes

Backtrex only ever uses closed candles from the higher timeframe, so no signal can repaint.

The candle window

By default a condition is checked on the last closed candle only. That is strict: if two conditions never land on exactly the same candle, their AND never triggers.

Widen the rarest one to true at least once over the last N candles:

Bullish Order Block (last 10 candles)
AND  RSI < 30 (last closed candle)

This is the number one cause of backtests that produce no trades at all.

Deducing conditions from your trades

You do not have to write everything by hand. Using the toolbar on the left of the chart, arm Long or Short and click candles to place up to three reference trades per direction.

The Deduce rules pill then appears: Backtrex analyses what those trades have in common at entry and suggests the matching conditions. You tick the ones you keep, and they land in the Builder as ordinary, editable conditions.

Three trades is both the minimum and the maximum per direction: below that everything looks "common", above it detection can only prune. Pick three trades from the same setup — three trades taken for three different reasons have nothing measurable in common.

Running the backtest

The bottom bar holds the run. At rest it shows the configuration (asset, period, capital, commission) and the Run backtest button; the gear icon opens the full settings.

The backtest timeframe is not a free choice: it is the finest of those used by your conditions.

Once the run is complete, the Trades tab lists every trade and displays them on the chart — the fastest way to find out whether your strategy does what you thought it did.