Running a strategy on your computer

01Where the strategy runs

A strategy started “On this computer” runs inside TTT, or, if you turned on “Keep my strategies running in the background” (Settings > Background), in a small background process of TTT on the same computer, which keeps running after you close TTT. Either way it depends on this computer being on, awake and connected.

Real money is never traded from your computer. A real account runs only on the strategy server, behind its risk firewall.

02When the connection drops

A strategy that cannot reach the market data cannot read new candles, and it does not decide on what it has not read: it waits, and asks again.

While it waits, nothing watches its positions. Their stops and targets are not checked until the missed candles are read.

When the connection is back, it reads the candles it missed, in order, and takes the exits they call for. On a demo account those exits are filled at the prices of the missed candles, as if they had been watched. On a real exchange an order that was never sent is never filled. A demo result that went through an outage is better than a real account would have had.

03When the computer sleeps, its battery runs out, or it is turned off

Nothing runs. A sleeping computer reads nothing, sends nothing and notifies nothing.

When it wakes, the strategy catches up as it does after a lost connection.

When the computer was turned off, or TTT and its background process were not running, a demo strategy is brought back by replaying it from its start. That takes longer the longer it has run. It comes back without opening TTT only if “Start it when I log in” is on.

A rehearsal starts flat and is not brought back after a restart.

04Catching up: exits are taken, late entries are not

An entry decided on a candle that is read more than three minutes after it closed is refused (“too late to enter”): the price it was decided on is gone, and entering at another one is not what was tested.

Exits are always taken.

A strategy that catches up after an outage may therefore hold fewer positions than its backtest did over the same days.

05Your session

The background process reads market data with the session TTT keeps on this computer. If the session expires or you sign out, the strategy cannot read market data until you sign in again in TTT. The desk shows its reads failing; it does not trade in the meantime.

06Everything else about your computer

An operating system update that restarts the computer, a full disk, a security program that stops the process, a wrong clock or a hardware failure can each stop a strategy or lose what it wrote on this computer. TTT writes its records so that a power cut does not corrupt them, but it cannot keep what the disk itself loses.

System notifications (an order opened or closed, a strategy stopped, the connection lost) are given as the operating system allows. “Do not disturb”, a locked screen or a sleeping computer can hold them back. Do not rely on them alone.

07Your decision

You choose to run a strategy on your computer and where to run it. What a demo account or a rehearsal shows is not a promise of what a real account would do, and nothing in TTT is investment advice.

The Terms of use apply to this as well, in particular “Trading carries risk, and nothing here is advice” and “No warranty, and limits on our liability”.

08Accepting, for each run

Before each run on your computer, TTT shows a box: “I have read the risks of running on this computer and accept them for this run”. It can be ticked only after this page has been opened from TTT. It is cleared after every start, so it is accepted once for each run, not once for all.

The version of this page is the date above. When it changes in substance, the date changes with it.