A strategy in Wildflower is a set of rules you wrote. It says what to look for, what must be true before you enter, how to enter, how to get out, and how much to risk. Your strategies live on the Library tab of the Strategies page.
You start with an empty page
You start with an empty page. Every rule and every number is yours. There are no templates, starter packs or examples to load, and block lists are in alphabetical order.
To make a strategy, give it a name. You get an empty page to fill in.
Draft or ready to run
Every strategy shows one of two badges:
- Draft. Something required has no value yet. Every strategy starts here.
- Ready to run. Every required field is filled in and the whole strategy checks out.
Wildflower works the badge out fresh each time you look. So it can never say a strategy is ready when Wildflower would refuse to run it. The badge is about your saved version, because that is the one you can run and put on an account.
Under a draft, "Still a draft" lists the settings with no value yet, in plain words. The Versions tab does the same for any earlier version you select.
A description you have not saved
Say you are part-way through describing a strategy in words and have not saved it. The strategy page shows that description in its own panel.
- With nothing saved yet, it says "You are still describing this one".
- With a saved version behind it, it says "You're part-way through describing a newer version". It also says the saved one is still what runs and what you can put on an account.
Either way you can carry on, or save what has been written down so far. Your saved version is not changed.
Two ways in
- Describe it in your own words. Wildflower writes it down and asks about anything it cannot pin down.
- Build it from blocks on the chart, picking each piece yourself.
Both make the same thing, and you can move between them.
Saved versions never change
A saved version is never edited. Saving again makes the next version. Each trade records a short code for the exact version that took it, so you can always see which rules were used.
Deleting, and getting it back
Deleting a strategy takes it out of your library but destroys nothing. Its versions and history stay, because your trades and backtests point to them. The Recently deleted section at the bottom of the Library tab lists what you deleted and when. Restore puts one back exactly as it was.