TradeStation Strategy Generator — Build, Validate, Export (EasyLanguage)

TradeStation is a powerful trading platform for backtesting and automation with EasyLanguage—but building enough strategy ideas to find real edges can turn into months of manual coding and trial-and-error.

Build Alpha is a TradeStation strategy generator that helps you create rule-based trading systems faster, stress-test robustness to reduce curve fitting, then export EasyLanguage code so you can run strategies inside TradeStation.

Why TradeStation traders use Build Alpha

Systematic traders typically hit the same bottlenecks:

• coding every idea is slow
• optimization can create “lucky” backtests
• it’s hard to validate whether a strategy will survive new market conditions

Build Alpha is designed to shorten the research loop:

Generate ideas → validate robustness → export EasyLanguage.

1) Build automated trading systems without coding (rules-first)

Build Alpha lets you define a complete strategy using configurable components:

• market(s) and timeframe(s)
• entry logic (signals + conditions)
• filters (trend/volatility/time windows)
• exits (hold time, stops, targets, trailing logic)
• position sizing method and constraints
• risk and money management
• objective function (what the engine optimizes for)

You control what’s allowed and what isn’t. From there, Build Alpha explores combinations algorithmically so you can evaluate more ideas without hand-coding each variation in EasyLanguage.

Market Data Integration

Traders can connect Build Alpha to TradeStation for historical market data and live data. This makes getting started and reliable results a much simpler process – an extreme value to those who have ideas to test! Below are the market data integrations available in Build Alpha.

Alternative Data & Signals TradeStation doesn’t provide out of the box

TradeStation has great historical market data. It is also a strong execution and backtesting platform, but most traders quickly hit a limitation: the built-in environment doesn’t come with a deep library of alternative data and “ready-to-test” contextual signals.

Build Alpha expands your research universe with signals and datasets that can be difficult or time-consuming to gather or even reproduce inside EasyLanguage, including (examples):

• Market breadth & internals
• Economic data & news events
• Treasury yields and spreads
• Vix term structure
• Weather Data
• Google Trends
• COT Report positioning
• Gamma Exposure
• Dark Pool Index
• Custom data imports (your own alternative datasets via CSV/TXT, plus custom signals)

Below shows how Google Search volume spikes for the word “Recession” have been closely correlated with equity market bottoms. Context your automated trading systems can use.

The practical benefit: you can generate and test strategy ideas on historical data that would otherwise require a lot of manual data wrangling. Export the final strategy logic back into TradeStation as EasyLanguage. The best part? You can trade these signals live as well.

2) Validate before you export strategy code (robustness-first)

A backtest can look great for the wrong reason. Robustness testing helps you filter out fragile strategies before deployment.

Build Alpha includes institutional-grade validation tools such as:

• Out-of-sample testing
• Monte Carlo analysis
• Noise Test (pictured below)
• Vs Random baseline
• Walk-forward optimization – with synthetic data

Build Alpha is an industry leader in institutional-grade stress testing. Read more here: Robustness Tests

Automated robustness testing (curve-fitting defense)

Generating strategies is easy. The hard part is filtering out backtests that only worked because of curve fitting or a lucky historical path.

Build Alpha is designed around a robustness-first workflow. Instead of manually checking strategies one-by-one, you can automate validation steps prior to running the strategy generator. This shows only automated systems that pass profit, risk and robustness testing. A huge time saver.

This is how you reduce the odds of exporting a fragile strategy into TradeStation.

3) Export Trading Strategies to TradeStation (EasyLanguage)

Once strategies pass your validation rules, export EasyLanguage code in one-click in the lower right. Use the Generate EL Code button so you can:

• run platform-native backtests in TradeStation
• confirm assumptions (session, costs, slippage)
• prepare for live execution in your TradeStation workflow

The generated EasyLanguage code can be copy and pasted into TradeStation’s Development Environment and saved as a new strategy. Please compile (verify) the strategy before attempting to load onto a chart.

Important: results can differ across platforms due to data feeds, session settings, time period, commissions/slippage assumptions, and order fill modeling. Align account assumptions to get the closest match. Here’s an example to show TradeStation (left) and Build Alpha (right) lining up.

Export EasyLanguage to TradeStation (fast setup)

Once you’ve generated a strategy in Build Alpha and it passes your filters, exporting to TradeStation is straightforward:

1. Generate EasyLanguage in Build Alpha

In the Strategy Results window, highlight the strategy you want and click the “Generate EL Code” button for EasyLanguage.

2. Open TradeStation Development Environment

In TradeStation, go to View → Development Environment.

3. Create a new Strategy

File → New → Strategy, then paste the generated EasyLanguage code.

4. Verify / compile

Compile the code (TradeStation will flag any issues immediately).

5. Apply to a chart & backtest

Open a chart for the symbol/timeframe you want and Insert Strategy to confirm behavior and results in your TradeStation environment.

Here is a video showing these steps in under 1-minute.

Please note this is an older video with BA v1. To see Build Alpha v3 Update.

Read more: How to automate trading with no coding

TradeStation partner promo (Build Alpha licensing)

If you open an account with TradeStation, you may be eligible for Build Alpha partner pricing through their promo program:

https://www.tradestation.com/promo/build-alpha/

If you qualify, it can reduce the effective cost of your Build Alpha license—while still letting you research in Build Alpha and deploy in TradeStation using EasyLanguage.

Who this is for

This is a fit if you:

• use TradeStation (or want EasyLanguage output)
• want to generate and test more strategy ideas faster
• care about avoiding curve fitting
• want a repeatable, robust research workflow
• want exportable code for deployment
• want access to contextual indicators and data

This is not a fit if you’re looking for:

• a signal service
• copy trading
• guaranteed performance

Portfolio simulation & portfolio testing (avoid “single-strategy” risk)

Even robust strategies can experience long drawdowns. One of the most practical ways to improve stability is to evaluate strategies as a portfolio, not as isolated systems.

Build Alpha includes portfolio simulation tools that let you combine multiple strategies and test them together so you can evaluate:

• portfolio-level equity curve behavior (smoothness vs volatility)
• drawdowns and risk when strategies overlap
• diversification benefits (correlation effects)
• realistic capital usage (shared/pooled capital vs per-strategy capital)
• whether a “good” strategy still adds value when paired with others

This is especially useful for TradeStation traders building multiple EasyLanguage strategies: instead of deploying one system and hoping it’s “the one,” you can build a small basket of validated systems and test how they behave together.

FAQ

As always, write to me anytime.

Thanks,

David