Overview - What is Trading Blox?

Trading Blox User's Guide

Revision 2008-05-08

For use with version 2.2

Trading Blox is a Windows-based software application that runs simulations of trading rules over historical end-of-day futures, stock, or forex price data. It determines the trades that those rules would have entered and the performance they would have exhibited.

It contains the rules for several well-known trading systems and allows users to change, test, and improve upon the specific input parameter values of the original system. Once a particular combination of parameter values has been historically tested and observed to produce acceptable results, then that same system can be traded live. With the click of a menu, Trading Blox generates the next day's entries and position sizes for you.

Each system supplied by Trading Blox has many input parameters whose values can be freely changed by the user. Some of these parameters have nothing to do with the system rules themselves, such as start and end date or the market.  Your testing can span 3 months or 30 years!  Other parameters affect how the system works, such as the number of days used to calculate a moving average.

By default, Trading Blox is set up with the parameter values that reflect a good starting point for testing each of the supplied systems. In addition, Trading Blox lets you to take these values and improve upon them, making it easy for you to create your own unique trading systems. It also provides the comfort and security that come from experiencing firsthand how those systems performed across various historical periods.

At Trading Blox, we understand that any trading system is only as good as the consistency with which it is applied. By harnessing the speed and reliability of modern-day computer hardware, Trading Blox significantly reduces the effort required to test and to trade a system, while eliminating the possibility of human error and missed trades. And therein lies its greatest strength: Trading Blox makes it easier to follow the trading systems you develop.

This manual is used by all of our products:

Some of the content may or may not be applicable to all applications. We have tried to make note of that, but if we missed something please let us know. In general, all the products have all the functionality here with the exception of the number of systems. The Trading Blox Turtle system has the Turtle system, the Donchian System, and the Triple Moving Average system, while the Trading Blox Professional system has those plus the ATR Channel Breakout, Bollinger Breakout, Bollinger Counter-trend, and Dual Moving Average. Trading Blox Builder has all systems and features listed in this manual.