Adding a condition without opening the strategy.

In the documented TradeStation environment, Trade When True was designed to work alongside built-in, custom, protected, and black-box entry-and-exit strategies on the same chart. It does not need to inspect or rewrite the original strategy’s source code.

The original strategy continues producing signals. Trade When True adds a separate permission condition: entries are allowed only while that condition is true. Current compatibility with any particular protected product or TradeStation version would need to be confirmed.

Yes. The added rule may be any valid single-line EasyLanguage expression that returns True or False. It could require RSI to be above 50, compare two moving averages, combine Stochastic and ADX values, limit trading to specified times, count entries made that day, or evaluate another built-in calculation.

If the desired calculation cannot conveniently be written in one line, a custom EasyLanguage function can calculate it and return the True-or-False result.

The manual describes one condition governing whether the strategies on the chart are permitted to trade. A more specialized distinction between long and short permission can be expressed within the EasyLanguage condition when the necessary information and logic are available, or separated into custom functions and coordinated conditions.

The exact design matters. A condition referring to market position behaves differently before entry than after a position exists, so David would first define precisely when each rule must be evaluated and what should happen to an existing position.

The user chooses. With the exit option disabled, the existing position remains open and the original strategy is responsible for exiting it. With the option enabled, Trade When True issues a market exit at the following bar’s open.

A second option can move the intended exit to the current bar’s close. The manual particularly discusses this for historical testing with price-based bars. Historical and live execution are not identical, so the selected behavior must be reviewed in both contexts.

Yes. Because the condition can evaluate EasyLanguage date and time information, it can reproduce many time, day, or month restrictions. The Start and Stop Trading collection also contains dedicated Trade Time Window, Trade Day Window, and Trade Month Window features with purpose-built settings and validation.

The dedicated feature is often easier when the requirement is simply a calendar boundary. Trade When True is most valuable when the permission rule is specialized or combines several calculations.

The standalone documented strategy allowed repeated insertion, but only the topmost copy affected the trades. The combined Start and Stop Trading product allowed up to ten separately configured Trade When True conditions.

Those conditions are ANDed together: every condition must be true before trading is permitted. If any one condition is false, trading is blocked. Breaking a large rule into several named conditions can make its intent easier to test and explain.

No. It works alongside one or more entry-and-exit strategies. Those strategies determine the theoretical signals; Trade When True permits or blocks their entries and can optionally issue an exit when its permission condition changes to false.

It therefore changes the trades that appear without becoming the underlying trading system itself.

The manual states that the documented version was designed for all three. However, the same condition can behave differently depending on bar type, evaluation timing, available historical data, order settings, and live market conditions.

A successful back-test does not establish that a condition will produce the same results live. The rule, bar behavior, and exit timing must be examined deliberately before automation.

The standalone Trade When True strategy must appear at the top of the chart’s strategy list so that its permission logic is applied before the underlying entry-and-exit strategies. Companion control strategies used with it also belong above the entry strategies.

The documented software displayed a warning when Trade When True was not placed correctly.

A valid condition is an EasyLanguage expression that compiles and returns True or False. That says nothing about whether it represents the trader’s intention, contains hidden assumptions, behaves properly across different markets and bar types, or improves a strategy.

This distinction is central to Emerald’s work: code can be syntactically correct while the rule itself is incomplete, ambiguous, or unsuitable for live conditions.