Creating and running strategies

When to use this guide

Use this guide when you are ready to turn your trading ideas into strategy revisions that can be evaluated with backtest jobs and operated through live deployments.

By the end, you will be able to:

• Create a new strategy.
• Add and manage strategy revisions.
• Understand how revisions capture changes to your strategy.
• Start and stop live deployments safely.

Key concepts

• A strategy is the top-level object for a trading idea (“SOL basis trade”, “ETH trend follower”).
• A strategy revision is a specific, immutable version of that strategy:
  • It contains the strategy’s logic, settings, and any revision-specific metadata.
  • You can run backtest jobs and live deployments from a specific revision.
• A strategy can have many revisions over time.
• A live deployment is the runtime path that operates a selected revision through a connected venue account.
• Today, strategy revisions emit target positions and the Target Position Executor manages order activity. Direct order actions are roadmap functionality; when introduced, they will let strategies place, cancel, and modify orders directly for strategies that need order-level control.

You can change your strategy only by creating new revisions, never by editing a revision in place.

Prerequisites

• You are signed in.
• To start a live deployment, you will also need one or more confirmed trading accounts. You can still define strategies before connecting accounts.

Create a new strategy

1. Go to the Strategies section of the app.
2. Click Create strategy (or similar).
3. Fill in:
   • Name – a clear, human‑readable label.
   • Description – what the strategy does, its goals, and any assumptions.
   • Tags – optional labels for organizing strategies (for example, basis, trend, experimental).
4. Confirm to create the strategy.

You now have a strategy with:

• A system‑generated ID that support may use for troubleshooting.
• Status typically set to Active.
• No revisions yet.

The strategy will appear in your main strategy list, but it cannot run until it has at least one revision.

Configure the first revision

From the newly created strategy:

1. Open the strategy detail page.
2. Click New revision or Create revision.
3. In the revision editor, you will typically:
   • Update the strategy logic and settings for this revision.
   • Select markets or instruments the strategy should trade.
   • Define how the strategy should behave, for example:
     • Data inputs and indicators.
     • Signal generation and risk rules.
     • Target-position behavior and position sizing.
   • Set revision-specific values such as thresholds, windows, and limits.
4. Add a short revision description summarizing what changed (for example, “Increase take‑profit from 2% to 3%”).
5. Save the revision.

This creates a strategy revision linked to your strategy with:

• A version identifier (for example, v1, 2024‑05‑01).
• Status set to stopped (not yet running).

The strategy’s metadata updates to show this as its latest revision.

Iterate with additional revisions

As you refine your idea:

1. Open the strategy.
2. View the list of revisions.
3. For each new idea:
   • Create a new revision.
   • Update the logic or settings for that revision.
4. Give each revision a meaningful version name and description.

Over time, you build a clear history of how your strategy evolved. Each revision remains immutable, so you can always:

• Run a backtest job against exactly the same logic.
• Understand which revision powered a live deployment during a given period.

Start a live deployment

To start a live deployment:

1. Ensure that:
   • At least one trading account is connected and confirmed.
   • That account is assigned to this strategy (see the trading accounts guide).
2. From the strategy detail page:
   • Choose which revision to deploy (or accept the suggested latest).
   • Click Start strategy.
3. Confirm any summary the app presents:
   • Which revision the deployment uses.
   • Which trading accounts it will use.
   • Any risk‑level warnings.

What happens during start

From your perspective, the deployment moves through lifecycle states:

• drafting: the deployment parameters are being specified by the user.
• provisioning: Structure is preparing the selected revision and runtime path.
• running: the deployment is active.
• stopping: Structure is shutting the deployment down.
• stopped: the deployment is no longer running.
• failed: the deployment could not start or continue.

Conceptually:

• Structure prepares the selected revision and runtime path.
• It wires that service up to the appropriate venues and accounts.
• Once healthy, the deployment moves to running.

You manage the strategy, selected revision, connected account, and deployment settings; Structure manages the operational workflow.

Monitor and stop a live deployment

On the Strategies overview page you can see, for each strategy:

• Current deployment status.
• The selected revision for the deployment.
• Linked trading accounts.

From a strategy’s detail page you can:

• Stop the current deployment:
  1. Click Stop strategy.
  2. Confirm you understand it will stop sending new order activity through the live deployment.
  3. The deployment transitions running → stopping → stopped when complete.
• Review:
  • Recent activity and logs (depending on UI).
  • Linked holdings and positions across accounts.

Stopping a deployment does not automatically close open positions unless your configuration explicitly targets lower or flat exposure before stopping. You can design that target-position behavior into the strategy logic, or manage closing positions manually at the venue level.

Next steps

Connecting trading accounts

Connect trading accounts before live operation.

Running backtest jobs

Test a new revision before live operation.