One of TradeStation's most significant advantages is that it enables you to design, historically test and optimize your own custom equities, options, futures and forex trading strategies before you risk a penny of trading capital.

For options traders, that means that you can back-test your assumptions on the underlying asset—using decades of historical data—to help you build your market outlook.

This breakthrough is possible thanks to a proprietary technology called EasyLanguage®. It lets you describe your ideas using simple, English-like statements and trading terms, very similar to how you would describe them to another trader. In fact, TradeStation's EasyLanguage is the industry standard for describing trading strategies. It's used by traders worldwide and often published in major trade publications and industry articles (for example: Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities Magazine, Active Trader Magazine, Futures Magazine, etc.). Let's take a look at how it's done:

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Let's say you've been watching a 5-minute chart of a certain security and noticed that whenever it makes a new low and then closes above the previous bar's close, momentum shifts and the security tends to head higher. Is this chart pattern just a fluke, or something that's happened consistently?

With any other trading platform, you'd have to stay glued to the chart waiting for that pattern to occur again, make the trade, and take your chances. But, with TradeStation, there's an easier way to test your idea. You simply click on "New Strategy" from the short-cut menu and type the following:

In fact, to make writing advanced strategies easier, TradeStation's EasyLanguage Dictionary includes several hundred pre-written built-in functions covering many of the most popular trading concepts and technical indicators. These include all types of Moving Averages, Stochastics, chart patterns and relative strength formulas, just to name a few. All you have to do is find what you're looking for using the intuitive search function, and then paste it into your strategy with one click.

Although the strategy is based on a very simple concept, TradeStation gives you the power to describe sophisticated ideas and strategies having dozens or even hundreds of parameters and conditions. For example, you can test strategies that contain multiple entry and exit signals, various order types (market, limit, stop orders), pyramiding and money management rules, advanced parameter optimization. You can create strategies on pre-market hours only, post-market hours only, pre-and post-market hours combined—or any other custom sessions you define. You can even have your strategy place limit orders based on real-time bid and/or ask price.

To give you even more flexibility in strategy creation, you can now create your strategies to include the ability to generate Buy, Sell, Short and Cover orders on a tick basis instead of only at the close of a bar. You can generate a Buy or Sell order the moment a condition occurs and reference the high and low of the current bar within your strategy.

But, creating your strategy is just the beginning of TradeStation's strategy testing power...