Backtest on random days

By the end of this tutorial you will have traded a week of BTC from a Monday Chartnaut picked at random, logged each opening range trade into your BTC opening range playbook as you took it, and filed any you missed afterwards. Because you did not choose the date, you cannot remember what happens next, and the practice counts.

This uses the playbook from Turn your trades into a playbook. Backtesting works on every plan; filing trades into a playbook needs Starter or above.

Start the session

1. Open Tools → Backtest. Your past sessions are listed here.

2. Click New session. The New Session page opens on Quickstart.

3. Under Instruments, click What do you want to trade? and choose BTC. The History row shows the dates available.

4. Under Session, change Name to BTC random week.

5. Leave Start on Random date. Chartnaut picks a Monday at random from BTC's history, and the session opens at 07:00 UTC that day.

6. Under Timing, turn on End after, then set Simulated to 5 Days. Leave Duration on Unlimited, so there is no real-time limit.

7. Under Account, leave Balance at 100,000.

8. Click Start session.

The chart opens in Replay on the date Chartnaut picked, with the replay controls on the chart. Advanced on the New Session page adds margin, commissions, slippage and risk rules when you want a stricter test. See How backtesting works.

Get to the open

1. In the replay controls, set the timeframe to 1m. Each step and each played bar then moves one minute. The list offers the timeframes of your open charts, so open a 1-minute BTC chart if 1m is missing.

2. Hover over the go-to button at the right end of the controls and choose New York Session. The replay jumps to 13:30 UTC.

3. Click Step Forward One Bar until the first 15 minutes of the New York session have printed. Mark the range's high and low with the drawing tools if it helps.

4. Click Play Simulation to let bars print on their own, and drag the speed slider to set the milliseconds between bars. Click Pause Simulation to stop.

See Replay for every control.

Trade the setup and log it

When BTC closes a bar outside the range, take the trade and file it in one go.

1. Right-click the chart and choose Position Manager → Open as a Panel.

2. Set up the trade with its stop and target. See Trading from the chart.

3. Click Add to chart. A list opens asking Log this trade?.

4. Click BTC opening range. Its tags open beside it.

5. Tick the tags that are true right now and choose a Range size.

6. Click Draft. The trade appears on the chart as a draft, with a tick and a cross on its entry label.

7. Click the tick to place it. Hovering the draft also offers Confirm Trade and Cancel Trade.

For a trade outside the setup, choose Skip Playbook Selection in the same list. Keep stepping and playing through the week. When a trade closes, Chartnaut saves it with its fills and chart snapshots.

You can stop any time. To carry on later, open the session from Tools → Backtest and click Play.

Find the trades and file any you missed

1. Open Tools → Backtest and click BTC random week.

2. Open the Trades tab. Positions lists every trade you took.

3. Click a trade. It opens in Trades, showing its detail.

4. If the Playbook row is empty, click it and choose BTC opening range under Log this trade to.

5. Click the Tags row, tick the tags that were true, and click Save.

6. Go back to the session and repeat for each trade you missed.

The session's Reports tab shows how the week went on its own: see Session reports. Your trades also sit in Trades under the origin Backtest, and they count towards your playbook's Historical Intelligence while Backtest is switched on in its Data sources.

Open BTC opening range from Trading → Playbooks and its Overview now includes the week you traded, with every trade tagged the same way as the rest.