Describe a strategy in plain English, and search for ideas in bulk

A big week in the app. Most of it started as a report or a question from you.

Describe your strategy and PTQ writes the rules

Until now you had to turn your idea into the builder's rules yourself. If you didn't know which indicator or comparison to pick, the strategy didn't go in.

Now there's a box at the top of the builder. Write the idea the way you'd say it and press Build it. PTQ asks about anything missing, with options you can tap, then proposes the rules. The engine checks them before you see them. If part of your idea can't be tested yet, PTQ tells you and leaves that part out. It never swaps in something close.

You can change anything it proposes before you save. Backtests and validation work exactly as before. It's in the competition builder too.

Search for ideas

PTQ used to test one idea at a time. The new Search for ideas page tests hundreds or thousands in one go.

You set the markets, the kinds of idea, the lookbacks, the stop sizes and the pass rules before anything runs. PTQ holds back the most recent years and scores every idea on the rest. It then marks the results down for how many ideas were tried, and gives only the finalists one test on the held-back years.

Most ideas fail. Most searches end with nothing at all, and the page says so. It also shows the ones that looked good and didn't hold up, so you can see what luck looks like. Anything that survives opens in the builder as a draft for you to test properly.

You see the size and the cost before you run it: 1 credit per 100 backtests. For now it searches daily bars only.

The builder does a lot more

Twelve more indicators: EMA, RSI, ATR, rate of change, standard deviation, volume and average volume, the Bollinger upper and lower bands, and the MACD line, signal and histogram. Each has an input for its settings.

• Read any value from a number of bars ago.
• Put a group of either/or conditions inside a rule. "RSI crosses above 30 and the close is above yesterday's high, or the MACD histogram turns positive" can now be written.
• Every indicator is worked out only from bars that had already closed. A setting the engine can't use is refused with the reason.

In Quant mode you can also limit entries to a time window in New York time, with an optional time to be out by. US stocks can be tested on pre-market and after-hours bars, 04:00 to 20:00.

And a rule can run on a watchlist of up to 40 tickers. PTQ ranks them on every bar by % up since yesterday's close or by volume, applies your price band and minimum volume, and only enters the top few. That's how you test something like "the top gainers priced $5 to $10 between 07:00 and 09:00".

A few limits, stated plainly:

• The finest bar is 1 minute. PTQ doesn't test on ticks.
• PTQ only ranks the list you give it. A stock that wasn't on your list can't be picked.
• Watchlist and pre-market strategies are for testing only, not practice or live trading, because that data is at least 15 minutes old.
• Each ticker on the list costs 1 credit per backtest.

Dark mode, and easier to read

PTQ now follows your device's appearance setting. Switch your computer or phone to dark and the app and the site go dark with it. Gains, losses and warnings were recoloured so they stay readable. There's no separate switch inside PTQ.

We went through every screen against Apple's design guidelines:

• Text is easier to read and grows when you raise your browser's text size.
• Every risk slider takes an exact typed number.
• Steps that matter, like allowing trading again after a stop or locking a competition entry, ask you to confirm and say what will happen.
• PTQ follows your device's settings for higher contrast, less transparency and less motion.
• Screen readers can read the charts and checks, and each chart has a "Show the numbers" table under it.

The see-through glass is now only on the bar at the top. Cards and panels are solid, so text always sits on a plain background. We also cut about one word in six across the app. Nothing you need to act on went, and every risk warning and simulated label is still there.

Take a strategy to MultiCharts

If you trade in MultiCharts, you can now export a saved strategy as a PowerLanguage signal. Open it on the Research page and expand Export to MultiCharts, or ask Claude. The top of the file lists the settings MultiCharts needs and every place it will behave differently from PTQ.

If a strategy uses something the export can't copy exactly, like a percent stop or your own indicator, you get a plain message saying which rule and why. It never changes a rule to make it fit.

Run it in MultiCharts, save the List of Trades, and bring it back. PTQ puts those trades next to its own backtest so you can check they match. Exports and imports use no credits.

The Academy course

If you're working through the course in the Academy:

• Days 3 to 6 now handle yesterday's high, low and midpoint built from intraday bars, a trading-hours window, stops at the last swing low or high, targets as a multiple of the risk (2R, 3R), and 1-minute data from your own CSV.
• Forex costs now start at 1 basis point a side. The old 6 basis point floor was about 7 pips a side on EURUSD, which made forex strategies look worse than they are. Everything else stays at 6.
• Gold and silver data now comes from the right feed, so Day 3 no longer comes back blocked on XAUUSD. 5-minute gold goes back about 8 months on a basic Tiingo key, so use 1-hour bars for a two-year test. The feed has no volume.
• Day 3 now works out how much of the account one stopped-out trade loses. Above 2% it warns you and shows what a losing run does to the account. Above 10% it won't go on unless you confirm. It also warns when one trade holds the whole account, because a gap can jump past the stop, and when your stop is far wider or tighter than one bar of your market normally moves.
• The Day 6 paper drill now sizes in fractions, so a 0.02 BTC order fills instead of rounding to nothing. The same risk rules apply there.

Download the newest prompt and tools from the Day 1, 3, 4 and 5 lessons, re-send the prompt in the same chat, and re-run Day 3.

The Jev trading loop

The Jev prompt builds a better loop now:

• It asks Jev for a judgment at most once every 4 seconds by default, reuses the last one in between, and backs off on rate-limit errors. Through the Vercel AI Gateway the old half-second loop kept failing with "access frequency is too high". Re-run the prompt to get it.
• Start and Stop buttons on the dashboard. Stop pauses new orders and keeps the data updating. Kill still closes positions.
• Every install and run step has a Windows form, and it works out which system and shell you're on.
• Ask for a market it can't trade, like forex or MT5, and it stops before building anything and offers the nearest one it can.
• You can set the bar size, from 1 minute to 1 hour.

The Academy price

The Part-Time Quant Academy is $29 a month from 1 October. If you joined at $9, you keep $9. If you saw $9 somewhere and were charged $29, reply to any email from us and we'll sort it.

Fixes

• New backtests and validations had been labelled "Historical result" on the Research page since 21 September, which also stopped strategies earning practice access. Fixed on 1 October. Results from before 21 September stay historical, because crypto risk-adjusted figures now use a 365-day year. Re-run the backtest and validation to bring one up to date.
• On the competition entry page, the pencil next to the strategy name now lets you rename it. If a submit fails, the confirm box stays open and shows the reason next to the button. If you've already entered, the page opens on "You're in".
• Academy members who opened the PTQ key screen got no code and no reason. It now says straight away that the Academy plan has no software key, and links to the competition page, where your access is.
• Seven bugs in the Jev loop are fixed. The position cap now counts buys still waiting to fill, resting orders are cancelled on every exit, old inventory is closed instead of freezing the loop, and fees, rounding and timeouts are handled properly.

If something here doesn't work the way it says, or there's something you want PTQ to do next, tell us.