Summary

Rules Editor

Signal Rules and Position Sizing Rules are entered directly into one of the five tabbed pages of Mechanica’s Rules Editor (a structured text editing facility).

Signal Rules

These files provide the foundation of logic that Mechanica uses to generate your system’s trades. Also called SIG files (*.sig), they hold all the information contained on the following pages:

n Resources

n Trade Entry

n Trade in Progress & Exit

Position Sizing Rules

Run by pressing Alt–P, R. These files provide the instructions that Mechanica uses to size and resize the trades generated by the Signal Rules. Also called SIZ files (*.siz), they hold all the information contained on the following pages:

n Initial Size

n Resize

Selecting Data

Choose Symbol Manager (Data menu). Select a Data Page (or pages). For each Data Page, under the Tag Symbols tab in the bottom half of the window, tag the symbol(s) you wish to include in your Signal Rules run. Click the close button (top right) or press Ctrl + F4 to close. The Symbol Manager window must be closed before running Signal Rules.

Running a System

Signal Rules can be run from (a) the Signals menu, or (b) the Signal toolbar, or (c) the F9 key.

Viewing Results

The Signal Results tab in the Results Window serves as a status bar that displays the last symbol run. The spreadsheet-style Grid displays a date for each day of data, along with the associated trade status, and entry and exit price for that date. The actual spreadsheet cells are populated with the column values created during execution of your SIG file.

Saving Your Work

Signal Rules and Position Sizing Rules (files) are created and stored separately; they are saved in accordance with Windows conventions.