TradeByBar
You don't need any experience to use TradeByBar. This page explains the whole idea in plain English, walks you through setting up your first automation step by step, then defines every term you'll run into.
Jump to: The basics · Step-by-step setup · Intelligence Mode · Glossary
Trading 101
Read top to bottom and you'll understand what the app is doing and why. Hover any underlined word for a quick definition.
TradeByBar trades futures, which are standardised contracts that track a market like the S&P 500 (ES), the Nasdaq-100 (NQ), or crude oil (CL).
Each market has a point value that sets how much a price move is worth. Beginners almost always start with the micro contracts (MES, MNQ), which risk a tenth as much per trade.
If you think a market will rise, you go long (buy). If you think it will fall, you go short (sell first, buy back later).
You protect each trade with a stop loss (auto-exit if it goes wrong) and a take profit (auto-exit once you've won). Together they form a bracket.
A strategy is just a set of if-this-then-trade rules. The "if" usually involves an indicator, which is a number calculated from price, like an EMA, RSI, or MACD.
You don't have to invent one. Pick a ready-made preset marked Beginner and tweak it later once you understand it.
First backtest a strategy on past data to see if the idea holds up. Then run it as paper trading: live prices, fake money, no risk.
Only when you're confident do you connect a live account with real money. There's no rush; paper trading is free and unlimited.
A prop firm (Topstep, Apex, FTMO, Lucid) will trade you with their money if you pass an evaluation: hit a profit target without breaking the daily-loss or trailing-drawdown rules.
Our backtester gives you a plain PASS / FAIL against those exact rules, as a historical check before you pay for an eval (it does not guarantee the actual evaluation will pass; rules change, verify against your contract).
You set risk caps (a max number of contracts, a max daily loss, and a trailing drawdown), and the engine blocks any order that would breach them. You can also restrict trading to set hours and have the engine flatten anything still open when the session ends.
A kill switch and a one-click flatten button can stop everything instantly. Trading always carries risk, but you decide exactly how much.
Step-by-step
Six steps from a brand-new account to a strategy running by itself on a paper account. Nothing here costs money or touches a real broker, so you can follow along start to finish with zero risk.
Sign up with an email. No card, no broker, and no trading history required. You land on the dashboard, which is the control room for everything below.
Start at /signupOn the dashboard, click Connect Account and choose Paper. A paper account starts with pretend money and fills your orders against real, live market prices, so you practise in realistic conditions with nothing at stake. When you're ready, connect a live Tradovate account to trade for real, with more brokers to follow.
Dashboard, then Connect AccountClick New Automation or Add strategy and pick a preset marked Beginner. EMA Cross on MES is a friendly first choice. A strategy is simply the set of buy and sell rules, and you can tweak every number later once it makes sense. (Presets run all the way up to Advanced price-structure plays, and folders keep a growing collection tidy.)
Dashboard, then StrategiesOpen Backtest, choose your strategy and a stretch of past data, then run it. You get an equity curve, a win rate, and a plain PASS or FAIL against real prop-firm rules (Topstep, Apex, FTMO, Lucid). This is a historical check on whether the idea held up; it does not guarantee the live evaluation will pass, and rules change, so verify against your contract.
Dashboard, then BacktestCreate an assignment that links the strategy to your paper account, and set your risk caps: a maximum number of contracts and a maximum daily loss. The engine blocks any order that would break those limits, so the worst case is capped before you begin.
Dashboard, then AssignmentsEnable the assignment. The always-on engine now runs your strategy on the paper account around the clock. Watch your live positions and fills update on the dashboard, track results on the daily P&L calendar, and get Discord DMs when trades open and close. If it ever goes quiet, the built-in diagnostics checklist tells you exactly why. A kill switch and a one-click Flatten button stop everything instantly.
Dashboard, then AutomationsBeyond the basics
Once the six steps above make sense, there's a more hands-off way to trade, available on the Intelligence plan. Instead of running one strategy, you let the engine research many, keep only the survivors, and trade whichever fits the market right now.
Click one button and the research engine tests thousands of rule combinations on past data. Here's the important part: testing thousands of ideas always turns up a few that look brilliant by pure luck, so the engine is built to be skeptical.
Every candidate must keep working across several separate stretches of history, its score is marked down for every extra idea that was tried, and it gets one final exam on a sealed slice of data it has never seen. Most candidates fail. That's the system working.
Bundle the survivors (and any strategy of your own) into one Intelligence Mode strategy. Each bar, the brain asks every one of them, plus live reads of trend, momentum, volatility, and order flow: which way, and how sure are you? It weighs each voice by how well it has done lately in conditions like these (trending, choppy, volatile, or quiet), and combines them into a single read: how strong is the case for long, for short, or for standing aside.
It sizes by its own conviction and stands aside when the voices are split or the evidence is thin. Standing aside is a feature, not a bug. Strategies that tend to agree share a vote, so a crowd of similar ideas cannot drown out an independent one.
Before big scheduled news (think Fed announcements or jobs reports), markets can jump violently in either direction. Intelligence Mode checks the economic calendar and skips or shrinks new entries around high-impact events.
You can also turn on managed exits: once a trade is winning, the stop loss moves toward breakeven to protect gains, then trails behind the price, and trades that go nowhere are closed instead of left to drift. Stops are not guaranteed fills: gaps, slippage, or outages can still produce a loss, so keep a broker-side stop on anything you cannot afford to leave unmanaged.
Everything the research engine produces arrives switched off. You arm it yourself, on a paper account first, and every order still passes your risk caps: contract limits, daily-loss limits, and the kill switch.
A decision journal records every entry, exit, strategy switch, and news skip with the reasoning, so you can always see why it did what it did. And remember: all of its evidence is historical. A strategy that passed every test can still fail tomorrow, which is exactly why you paper-trade it for weeks before any real money.
Glossary
The same definitions that pop up across the dashboard. Search for anything that confused you.
Create a free account and follow the six steps above to get a beginner strategy running on a paper account, with nothing at risk.